


Transducer

by hal_incandenza



Category: Pacific Rim (Movies)
Genre: 1970s, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Spies & Secret Agents, But Not Really...They are scientists who work for MI6, Cold War, Domestic, Espionage, Gen, Light Angst, London, M/M, MI6 Agents, Mystery, Pen Pals, Science Fiction, we know they are not competent enough to be actual agents
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-03-31
Updated: 2019-11-09
Packaged: 2019-11-09 08:11:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 13
Words: 53,340
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17998163
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hal_incandenza/pseuds/hal_incandenza
Summary: “I need you to hide something for me.”“Oh, excellent. Of course, Newton, please allow me to jeopardize my career. And yours as well. My pleasure. Do go on.”“Yeesh, relax,” said Newton. “It’s a personal thing, not a work thing.”“As if there is any division between the two,” Hermann snapped.If only you knew,Newt thought.





	1. Blueprints

**PART ONE**

“I should like to write you the kind of words that burn the paper they are written on—but words like that have a way of being not only unforgettable but unforgivable. You will burn the paper in any case; and I would rather there should be nothing in it that you cannot forget if you want to.”    
— Lord Peter Wimsey, Dorothy L. Sayers, _Gaudy Night_

 **1.**   **Blueprints**

THE LATE FEBRUARY FLURRY could not do much damage. The falling flakes gave over to freezing drizzle in capitulation to the distant but oncoming spring, and the snow withdrew from the ground like a shadow at noon. When the next day dawned, driving conditions were not what any prudent Englishman would have called ‘navigable.’ But Newton Geiszler, Ph.D., was neither prudent nor—to his relief—an Englishman. On the morning of February 23rd, he rode his motorcycle to the office.

Division headquarters was decried by most of its employees as insecure. For the most secret office in the capital, its location was the city’s worst-kept secret. Ten years had passed, they said, and had we learned nothing? Vice Chief Victor had said that once, as an experiment, he got into a cab and asked for their headquarters. The cabbie took him straight there, asking only if he wanted to go in front or round the back.

This tradition was perfectly satisfactory to Newt. He parked his noisy American combustion engine in the underground garage per usual and walked the remaining blocks on foot. He climbed the concrete steps of the Century Building, greeted the front desk receptionist (to cheery reply), the morning watchman (to no reply), and pushed the button for a lift going down. His pressed colleagues had already pressed for the lift up. They gave him their usual curt greetings, and when their lift arrived first, they stepped in. The doors closed on Dr. Geiszler, hands in pockets, waiting for his ride down to the basement.

Everyone knew that the radio coding lab in the Century sub-basement was run by eccentrics. In the oblique language of the Division, they were known as “specialists,” but their nickname in mixed company was the “Looney Tuners.” Geiszler and his acerbic colleague Gottlieb, under operations manager Hal Weeks, ran radio technology and cryptography research. They developed new technology and techniques for signals interception and analysis. Newton Geiszler was an engineer, taking apart Soviet surveillance tech and building it better for the Division. Hermann Gottlieb was a cryptanalyst, analyzing enemy codes and writing ways of undoing them. These methods they passed upstairs, to ops and the coding bay respectively.

Upstairs, Weeks did his faltering best under the excessively watchful eye of Vice Chief Victor. (Victor was his only name—whether it was his Christian name or his surname was unknown.) It was he who had cleaned the Division out, top to bottom, in the crisis; but his paranoia had not stopped there. Over the next ten years it had only grown worse. He prowled the halls and filing cabinets and databanks, sniffing out double agents where there were none. And he did it all with the tacit blessing of the unseen Chief, who had no name at all.

Geiszler and Gottlieb survived on their reputation as insufferable but effective. They were tolerated for their abilities and laughed at for their bickering. Colleagues speculated on whether they actually hated each other, but by and large, they thought not. Gottlieb and Geiszler looked out for each other the way people at the bottom do. And if any of their colleagues had discovered that they had keys to each other’s apartments on their respective keyrings, perhaps that would not have been any surprise.

Newt entered the door code and was admitted, with a beep, to the lab. All the desks were empty except for Dr. Gottlieb’s. His most punctual colleague was already hard at work.

He spared him an over-the-glasses glance. “You’ve survived another commute, I see.”

“I told you I would,” said Newt, setting down his bag and unbuttoning his jacket. “It’s a lucky day.”

“Is it?” said Hermann.

“Check your calendar, Doctorate in Mathematics,” Newt said. “The date is all primes.”

“My degree is in mathematics, not number trivia,” Hermann said, looking back at his dispatches.

“Of course. My apologies. Primes. _So_ trivial. So rational. So concrete. Can’t have that.” Newt hung up his jacket. “I’ll come back when the date aligns with something nice and imaginary. Some abstract, abstruse equation that has no bearing on the real world.”

“You do that,” Hermann replied. “In any case, it’s 1973. There will be prime dates all year.”

“Exactly.” Newt picked up his bag and headed towards his office door. “So it’s going to be a very lucky year.”

“Superstitious,” Hermann called after him without looking up. “And irrational. Just like every year with you.”

But it was Dr. Geiszler’s optimistic superstition that bore out, because lying on his desk was a very special file. He opened it, and right away saw two things: one, that it contained a blueprint for a top secret new transmitter, and two, a label making clear that this was not for his eyes. This file was fifth-floor only.

Newt ran out into the hall to see the receding back of the useless kid who’d delivered it. He called him back and handed him the file: “I don’t know whose desk this was supposed to be landing on, but it’s not mine. Don’t worry. I won’t tell them. Morning, Wesley,” he added to their labmate, who was just arriving. Wesley appeared not to hear. Newt returned to his office.

His employers knew that he was exceptional, perhaps even a genius in his field. They were lucky to have him in the Division at all, they said. By all rights, he should have been at the D.O.D. in his motherland. But what they did not know—what he had succeeded in concealing for nearly two decades—was that Dr. Geiszler had an eidetic memory.

One look at the blueprint was all he needed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> BLURB: Newt and Hermann are the secret stars of the crypto tech laboratory in the Division. But a strange new case reopens a classified file nearly ten years old—Hermann’s first and last foray into the field. What is this new technology? What really happened ten years ago? Is there a double agent in their midst? Newt is in danger from all sides, including himself, and Hermann must unravel the case before time runs out. Brought to you by too many John le Carré books & too much daydreaming time in studio classes. 
> 
> Fic mix [Side A](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/35Clt40JVVsic4tv2s4sI5?si=uKN3yjquTMGY8QvQE3tzbw) & [Side B (Newt's record collection c. 1973)](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3Cw8y6zXdwD4jxJwjcPmc2?si=stykJrp3TzOp-mmPwtgRqw). New chapters starting in June.


	2. The Sleeper

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello all! The time has come! We are back! Thank you for your kind comments--and for waiting! Thank you also to my editor Sasha, for her support and love 💖Here we go! 
> 
> Transducer will update every other Friday.

**2\. The Sleeper**

_Two years earlier_

THE NURSE HAD NOTED that morning that it would be particularly warm; she could tell from the way the clouds hung low and gray at dawn. Now sunlight rained down outside, and dark afternoon heat drenched the corridors in the hospital. Her mother used to call it _die Affenhitze,_ the ‘ape heat.’ The nurse hadn’t heard that expression much since her childhood, but on such days, it resurfaced in her mind.

Krankenhaus Sankt Magnus stood on the furthest outskirts of East Berlin. It was a low series of brick buildings, secluded among the trees. She had worked there for the last fifteen years. Like any hospital in East Berlin, it was a public hospital, but somehow it seemed to have more money than others.

She was wheeling her cart to the end of the main building, towards the long-term ward. She’d finished her rounds, but then her supervisor, wiping the perspiration from his forehead, had asked, “Can you see to the long-term ward as well?” She agreed, hiding her reluctance. The long-term ward made her sad, and uneasy.

The ward was at the westernmost corner of the building, near the riverbank. Though the exterior walls were lined with windows, the blinds were drawn, and so were the gauzy inner curtains. It gave the clean white ward that special darkness found only in shaded spaces shielded from harsh sunlight.

Before her lay a dozen pale, motionless faces. She slowly pushed her cart along the aisle between their two rows. They were so few that they felt like a community—like they played cards together on weekends, smoking and talking of the old days. But they were drained as white as the rooms around them, and they slept as if they were already dead.

She stopped beside the last man on the window side. He had deep lines under his eyes and in between his thick red brows. With his untamed hair, he looked older and rougher than he probably was. He was not as pale as the others; in fact, his face was a bit ruddy. Sweat beaded around his peaked hairline. It seemed he was the only one who felt the heat.

The nurse remembered his arrival, almost nine years before. He had arrived anonymous. They knew nothing of him. They had removed the bullet in his chest and treated his burns, but he had not woken. His external wounds had long since healed; there was something internal that would not resolve.

Yet he sweated. Even in the shade. The nurse tsked softly and went to the window. She pulled up the blinds and sunlight poured in.

She turned back to the sweating man. His eyes were open.

She gasped and jumped back, grabbing the headboard behind her.

He opened his mouth, forming a word: “ _Gott... Gott.._.”

Trembling, she pressed a hand to his shoulder.

“Water,” he croaked at last.

Why had he switched to English? The nurse recovered herself enough to nod.

She moved to go to the sink, letting go of him, but a hand caught her wrist. His grip was impossibly firm for a man in his condition.

“Wait.”

“Sir,” she said, speaking German, for though she understood some English, she could not speak it. “Please let go. You need water. I need to call the doctor.”

“No, no doctor,” he said, switching back to German. His accent was flawless. “I need the embassy.”

“You need a doctor.”

“I need the embassy.”

“Which embassy?” she said. “You are a diplomat, sir?”

He coughed. His face was sweating more than ever, but his voice was bone dry. She had never seen anyone who looked less like a diplomat.

“What year is it?”

She shivered.

“Sir... You must let me call the doctor.”

He squeezed her wrist. With his brown eyes open he looked ten years younger already. They begged her ear, made her complicit. “Call no one. Please. Tell me. What year is this?”

“1971.”

The man relaxed slowly, falling silent. The lines of his face loosened from consternation into something more obscure.

“Let me get you water,” she said softly.

He let go of her arm.

The nurse hurried to the ward phone and called the dispatch desk. But the internal line was busy. Agitated, she told the man she would return and to please lie still. He nodded, but his eyes were on the phone.

It took her five minutes to hurry down to the dispatch desk. The nurse on duty there did not know where to find the right doctor, and they spent ten minutes looking for him. But he was busy, and could not come until he had finished his consultation, and when he finally did, almost half an hour had passed. The nurse was agitated—the man’s wild eyes and strong grip had left an impression of danger. Whether he was in it, or was it, she did not know. But she did not like to leave him alone.

When she finally herded the doctor, her supervisor, and another nurse back to the ward, the man was gone. His bed was empty. The phone was off the hook. The window was open.

It was impossible that he had walked, after eight years spent dead. Impossible, the doctor said. He must have had help. So, the supervisor asked, who took him? Who did he call?

It seemed impossible—yet the nurse had her doubts. None of them had felt that grip.

The window was still open, the same window whose blinds she had raised to let the light in. No breeze disturbed the translucent curtain.


	3. Airedale Street

**3\. Airedale Street**

Thursday, 31 May 1973  
London, England

IT WAS HERMANN GOTTLIEB’S POLICY that as long as he continued to behave as normal, any out-of-the-ordinary situation would resolve itself. If something was amiss in the system, it was because somebody else had done something untoward. The usual suspects were foreign agents, retail clerks, small committees high up in national government, and his partner. But none were any match for Hermann’s routine, and the doggedness with which he could stick to it.

So this Thursday he left Century at 5 PM, as if it were a normal weekday evening. There were several reasons why it was not.

“Vice Chief Victor believes there is a mole among us.”

The words echoed in his mind as he descended the Lambeth North staircase with the rest of the crowd. They had been spoken in Weeks’s office a few hours before, and they would have impressed Hermann more if he hadn’t heard them every few months since 1963.

The train arrived crowded and Hermann boarded it with everyone else. All the seats were occupied by the time he got on, and only one person looked up. The stranger’s eyes flicked up to Dr. Gottlieb’s cane, up to his bent middle, and then to his face. He bestowed upon Hermann an openly hostile look before reopening his newspaper. Hermann’s face twitched angrily, and since he was distracted when the train started to move, he stumbled sideways. He bumped into an older woman in an overcoat, who steadied him and asked if he was all right.

“Quite,” he snapped, taking hold of a pole.

The woman turning away in a huff would have been astonished to learn that the man spreading waves of irritation throughout the subway car was a valuable asset to British intelligence. Hermann Gottlieb was a tallish, thinnish man with a cane and a vague continental anonymity. He was professorially dressed and professorially hunched. His face was strangely geometric, like it had been sculpted by an art student who only had access to sharp-angled tools. If you asked his family, he worked for the Treasury. His neighbors thought he worked for ‘the government.’ A stranger would have taken him for an accountant, a teacher, or a mathematician. The former was true, if you asked his labmate; the latter was true if you asked his bosses. Hermann was one of the foremost minds in British cryptanalysis, and had been for almost twenty years.

“We—” Weeks had stumbled on the pronoun, eyes darting sideways to where Victor’s assistant stood in the corner, out of his eye-line—“We, uh believe Orpheus is a serious threat. We’re upgrading him to top priority.”

Weeks had called Gottlieb into his office that afternoon to nervously relay this message, apparently brought by Victor’s assistant Preston, a pint-sized bulldog in a well-fitted suit. It seemed the further Victor retreated into his files, the more Hermann saw of Preston, and the further Victor’s reach grew in the service. In fact, he didn’t think he’d seen Victor in person since the new year. He was becoming as reclusive as the Chief.

“Top priority, sir?” Hermann shot Preston a suspicious glance. “We’ve been picking up these Orpheus transmissions for nearly two years.”

The train jerked, and Herman winced as his back bent with the effort of staying on his feet. He straightened up, sighing through his nose. He did not look down at the people sitting placidly in their seats, and they did not look up at him. Though born in Germany, he was long assimilated into the codes of English discourtesy. He put his free hand on his hip and tried to keep it still. It was beginning to ache insistently.

The Orpheus transmissions had started appearing at irregular and intense intervals in radio traffic two years ago. Among hundreds of routine Razvedka signals from fixed positions, Orpheus broadcast at irregular times from irregular locations. They were distinguished by their unusual encryption, which did not appear to be OTP or any other conventional Razvedka cipher.

Hermann and the coding bays had not spent much time on the Orpheus transmissions because they were infrequent and had always been graded low-priority—until now.

Victor believed Orpheus was a mole somewhere in the British secret services, and that the transmissions were coded messages between himself and his handler. Hermann would not normally have dismissed the possibility out of hand, but it was harder to buy, coming from the man who cried mole.

Someone stood up for her stop, and, as if she hadn’t noticed Hermann before, gestured to her empty seat. Hermann shook his head, excessively deferent, and said, “My stop’s next.” His hip ached in protest. She passed by him, and he, gripping his cane, let someone else sit down instead.

“Orpheus is top priority, Gottlieb,” Preston had said. “The ‘why’ is unimportant to you. Only the how. I’ll need your files.”

“My files?”

“The Orpheus records,” Preston snapped. “I’m taking them upstairs.”

“Victor can come get them himself if he wants them,” Hermann was tempted to say, but did not. Victor had avoided Hermann for the last ten years—today would be no different.

“When will I get them back?” Hermann asked instead.

The intercom announced his stop, Wheaten Street, coming next. Hermann heard it without much relief. Normally, he left work at work. At home, he was a regular person, with regular hobbies, regular hopes, regular secrets. But as the train slowed and stopped, work clung to his thoughts: the unreadable transmissions, the unknown mole, even the absent Victor’s ever-present cold shoulder.

And normally, he did not eat dinner alone. But tonight, he would. His habitual guest had left town.

Hermann emerged into the sun and turned up Wheaten Street. He looked up at Newton’s building as he passed it, eyes climbing to his third-floor window. The light glared off it, shielding it from his eyes, and for a second in the evening sun he felt dislocated from time, terribly out of place. Something was wrong, he thought, something was horribly wrong. Then the light moved as he did, and he saw that the curtains were drawn, just like always.

And anyway, nobody was home.

Hermann turned a corner, walked another block, and turned onto his street, Airedale Street.

On the stairs inside of his building, he heard music. For a moment he thought a neighbor was listening to Liszt at a disrespectful volume, for those were the unmistakable bars of the Contrabandista. But as he reached the top step, the notes stumbled.

Something like a smile disturbed the blunt lines of his face. Hermann took out his keys quietly.

The heavy opening motif plunged down again before stopping abruptly. The player restarted a few measures back.

Hermann unlocked and opened the door softly, and the playing continued at full volume. It was dark in the front hall—the first blue shadows of night were falling in from the kitchen doorway at one end, and the front balcony door at the other. Warm light came from the living room doorway, because someone had turned on a lamp.

Hermann slipped off his shoes and stepped into his slippers. He closed the front door with care, but as soon as the bolt clicked home, the song abruptly changed.

“Liszt giving you difficulty?” said Hermann, emerging into the light and leaning against the living room door frame.

“Liszt? Me?” Newton, sitting at Herman's upright piano, made a scoffing sound. “Don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Strange,” said Hermann, beginning to unbutton his shirt cuffs. “I thought for certain I heard someone practicing the Contrabandista as I came in.”

“Now why on Earth would I do a thing like that?” said Newt. He made as if squinting at the sheet music, while continuing to sound out In-a-Gadda-Da-Vida with his fingers. “First of all, the Contrabandista is outrageously difficult. Even _Liszt_ couldn’t play it. Second, it’s nowhere near as badass as Iron Butterfly. And third, I don’t ‘practice.’ I’m just good.”

“Is that so?” said Hermann, switching to his other cuff.

“Yes. And if I _did_ have to practice,” Newt said, finally looking up at Hermann, “I certainly wouldn’t allow anyone to witness it. I have to maintain my pristine reputation for effortless genius.”

The prodigal engineer was a short but leggy man, dressed for work in one of his unprofessional patterned shirts, no tie. He had thick-framed and thick-lensed glasses. His large forehead was accentuated by a high sweep of hair, one he maintained carefully even as it passed out of style. He peered at Hermann with heavy-lidded green eyes.

“I would _not_ call your reputation in _this_ flat ‘pristine,’” Hermann said.

“But you would call it genius?”

“I would say,” said Hermann, approaching the piano, “that anybody who can play El Contrabandista will be eligible for consideration for such a title.”

“Hmm. Doesn’t sound worth the hassle,” said Newt. “What’s your policy on Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2?”

He played the opening bars.

“I like the Contrabandista,” said Hermann, leaning on the piano. “It sounds like an argument.”

“Can’t possibly imagine why that would be appealing to you,” Newt said. But he was unable to keep from smiling as Hermann leaned in and kissed him on the cheek.

“I thought you’d already left for the conference,” Hermann said, crossing the living room and going into his bedroom.

“Decided to go tomorrow morning,” Newt called to him as Hermann opened his closet. “But I went to the station this afternoon and sent my things ahead.”

“Sent ahead so you could...?”

“Yes, so I could go up on the Bonneville. You think I'm going up to the countryside in June and _not_ going riding? Come off it.”

Newt played a few more measures of Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2.

“God, it’s been years since I was up at the Estate,” Newt said. “I didn’t even have the Bonneville back then.”

Hermann hated Newton’s motorcycle. He chose on this occasion not to comment.

“How was work?” Newt called. “Everyone miss me already?”

“Wesley does,” Hermann answered. Wesley was their older labmate, a strange, friendless engineer with a couple of consuming obsessions. “Weeks sent him to my desk, to divide the labor on Orpheus, and all he wanted to talk about was—”

“Fermat?”

“ _Fermat_. _”_ Hermann sighed frustratedly.

“Never gets old, does it?”

“I wish someone would solve that blasted theorem so I would never have to hear about it again,” Hermann said, reemerging from his room in a sweater. “If he would just choose something _useful_ to devote himself to, like Poincaré, or even something just _interesting_ like the Riemann—”

“Hey, don’t you get him started on Riemann,” Newt said, breaking off his playing to point at Hermann as he passed. “I’m going to get that bastard myself.”

“If you really still think a _machine_ is going to solve the Riemann hypothesis, you’re a romantic,” Hermann said, going into the kitchen.

“Guilty,” said Newt.

“In any case,” Hermann said, as Newton resumed with something more melancholy, “Wesley finally stopped talking long enough to ask where you were. I told him you’d be gone until Tuesday.”

“Did he say he’d miss me?”

“He said, ‘It’s always so quiet when Newt is gone,’” Hermann replied, imitating Wesley’s deeper voice. “And I agreed.”

Newt made a face. He resumed Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2.

“So Weeks has you back on Orpheus? What, has it been a slow week?”

“Actually—Victor,” called Hermann, stress making him violate his minimal-work-talk-at-home rule. “Preston the watchdog came down and told us it was top priority, all of a sudden. Victor wants full traffic analysis, cross-referenced with travel records of active duty personnel.”

“For who?”

“Ops and officers. He gave us an enormous list.”

A stumble on the keys, and a correction.

“Preston took all my Orpheus files upstairs. I’m sure Victor’s in his office poring over them right now.”

“He didn’t come down himself?”

“He never does.”

Newt paused, and then started playing the opening of the Contrabandista again.

“Why Orpheus now?”

“Preston wouldn’t say,” Hermann replied. He took out a pot and began filling it with water. “He thinks it’s a mole.”

“Ah. Typical.”

Hermann made a noise of assent and shut the water off.

Newt’s hands slowed down, playing lightly.

“He could be right, though,” he offered. “I mean, this is exactly how the Americans finally caught Bowen.”

“Found him out,” Hermann corrected.

Newt rolled his eyes. “Well they _nearly_ caught him.”

With a click-click-click the burner turned on.

“And imagine if they—or we—had,” said Hermann, not archly enough to disguise a genuine bitterness. “Maybe Victor would be tolerable.”

“Maybe he would tolerate _you_ ,” Newt said.

“Doubtful,” said Hermann, putting a lid on the pot.

The notes tumbled over each other. Then abruptly, they stopped.

“But how _did_ they lose him?”

“Bowen?”

“Yeah.”

“What do you mean?”

The piano lid shut. Newt appeared in the kitchen doorway, massaging his left wrist. Hermann was sitting at the table peeling potatoes.

“Do you really think they knew? At the Estate?”

“Newton, what do you—”

But Newt was distracted by the appearance of Laplace. “There he is!”

Hermann turned and watched his cat lumber into the kitchen.

“Leave him alone,” Hermann said pointlessly. Newton was already pursuing the cat into the pantry. Laplace was extremely fat and unpersonable, and staunchly resistant to Newton’s advances. From the pantry came a predictable hiss and predictable cry.

“Hermann,” said Newton plaintively, reemerging into the kitchen.

“He hates everyone.”

“But I’m not everyone. I saved him. _I_ gave him to you.”

Newton had found the bedraggled cat on his balcony a few years before. He was unable to keep it, because he kept birds, and the cat had a hunger in its eyes.

“Who is this ‘everyone,’ anyway?” said Newt. “When has he met another human being? Who have you been bringing round to harass the cat? I just don’t understand why the Estate people let Bowen _stay_ there after the warrant was issued,” he said, swerving between topics without pausing for breath.

The Division’s infamous former Vice Chief, deep cover Soviet spy Robert Bowen, cast a long shadow—a shadow ten years long. Hermann had known him, through Victor, though they had never worked closely together. Bowen had been just as charming as his reputation, just as finely and eccentrically dressed, with his one drooping eyelid and his attentive smile. No one with their head on straight would have accused him of being anything as outrageous as a Razvedka agent.

But he was. And when, after more than twenty years undercover, the Americans discovered his treachery, Bowen fled. He hid out at the Estate, the Division’s training ground in East Anglia.

Headquarters issued a warrant for his arrest, and a red-alert to all employees. But, inexplicably, he did not flee the country right away. He stayed at the Estate for two days. Even more inexplicably, the Division employees who worked there—teachers, trainers, and support staff—let him. They hosted him, did not tell London he was there, and then, when he announced that he was leaving, they did nothing to detain him. Somebody drove him to the train station, and he rode the last hundred miles to Great Yarmouth Port, where a Scandinavian merchant in the U.S.S.R.’s employ picked him up, and smuggled the mole away via the Baltic to freedom.

“I’m sure I don’t know,” Hermann said, looking back down at the potatoes. “You used to work at the Estate. You knew those people.”

“Used to,” said Newt. “And almost everyone was fired.”

“Ask Caitlin.”

“She was fired too,” Newt said, as if Hermann didn’t know that.

“You’ll see her next week, won’t you?”

“At our gig? Yeah.”

Newt wandered to the stove and opened the pot.

“I see her every week, Hermann. That doesn’t mean she wants to talk about it.”

Newt shut the lid.

“I just don’t get it,” he said. “After all these years, I still don’t.”

“As I understand it, the Americans found transmissions corresponding to a mole in the British service. They matched the locations, times, and dates to his travel patterns, then brought the evidence to Whiteha—”

“No, I understand _that_ ,” Newt said, sitting down across from Hermann. “It’s the Estate thing I don’t get.”

Hermann handed him a paring knife.

“I don’t understand why he even went there at all,” said Newt, picking up a potato and beginning to peel. “So the Americans tell us on Friday. Someone tips him off. He skips town. Goes to the Estate. But he _stops_ there _._ Then on Saturday, the scandal breaks. And he _stays_.”

“Yes.”

“Until _Sunday_.”

“Yes.”

“That’s what I don’t get. Why did he stop? Why didn’t he leave? It’s not that far from the port. He could have left the country on Friday, before his photo was sent out to every border crossing in Western Europe. Why did he wait?”

“I’ve no idea,” said Hermann frankly.

“It’s not how _I_ would have done it,” Newt commented, putting a potato in the bowl.

Hermann said nothing.

“Maybe he had misgivings about defecting,” Newt said. “I mean, it’s one thing to serve the Raz at a comfortable distance for twenty years. It’s another thing to actually live under Soviet rule.”

“Perhaps,” said Hermann.

Something in his voice made Newt glance up at him.

“What I really don’t understand is the Estate staff,” Newt said, looking back at his potato. “Why didn’t they rat him out?”

“He might have interfered with the alarm call somehow,” suggested Hermann. Newton frowned. Engineering and circuitry genius he may have been, but the human intricacies of operational spycraft never came easily to him.

Hermann put a peeled potato in the bowl of water and started on the last one.

“The thing is,” Newt said finally, “I don’t even think any of the Estate staff were actually turned. They weren’t his agents. I knew them back then,” he said. “And I saw the reports, afterwards. During restructuring. None of them were on the lists. They weren’t traitors.”

“It would only take one,” Hermann pointed out. “One traitor to take the alarm call, to cover for him.”

Newt just frowned and shook his head.

“I don’t know,” Newt said. “I think he just... talked them into it.”

This vexed Newt for some reason. It vexed Hermann too. It vexed Victor, who had been a great friend of Bowen’s. Victor, Robert Bowen, and Charles Rennie—they were the famous trio, Victor and the ‘Twins.’ Nobody had been taken in by that Bowen charm like Victor had, and no one had been more blindsided. Except perhaps for Rennie; but he was dead.

Hermann put the last potato into the bowl of water. “It’s certainly strange,” he said, standing up.

“ _I’ll_ never understand it,” Newt said, as Hermann took the potatoes to the stove.

“Well, I don’t think it’s likely to come up this weekend.”

“Bowen always comes up,” said Newt, putting his feet on Hermann’s vacated chair. “If we don’t bring it up, the Americans do. Honestly, they were so pissed about Bowen, you’d think it was them he double-crossed. Like, it’s been a decade. Get over it.”

“I think that’s the hope,” said Hermann. “At least from the way Weeks talked about it.”

“Ugh. Weeks.” Newt was slicing the potato peelings into smaller and smaller pieces. “He’d lie down in a puddle and let the Americans walk right over him if they told him they didn’t want to get mud on their shoes.”

“Frankly I think he would let any authority figure do so,” Hermann said, giving the potatoes one last stir and shutting the lid.

Newt laughed.

“Strong words, coming from _you._ ”

Hermann dried his hands primly on a dishtowel. “Exactly.”

“Maybe the mole will strike again this weekend,” said Newt. “Send some frantic messages from the conference. Maybe Orpheus is Bowen, Mark Two. Bowen, son of Bowen.”

“I certainly hope not,” said Hermann.

“Can you imagine Victor’s face?”

“I doubt that he would survive another Bowen,” said Hermann honestly.

But that was impossible anyhow—Victor had no one left to betray him. He had made sure of that.

*

They ate dinner and retired to the living room, where Hermann tried to catch up on his reading and Newton made unappreciative comments about the Debussy record Hermann had put on specifically to irritate him. Newton was rereading _The Fellowship of the Ring,_ as he seemed to do annually, with his feet tucked under Hermann’s thigh.

“This is my record player, Newton, if you take issue with my record selection, you can go home. To _your_ record player.”

“I’ll beat you at chess next weekend,” said Newt, turning a page. “Enjoy your two-week reign while you can.”

“Your belief that beating me at chess gives you legal claim over the music selection—”

“Not _legal_ claim, but it does give me veto power—”

“—is almost as pathetic as your belief you are better at chess than I am—”

“All flukes,” Newt said, turning another page rebelliously.

“Right. Whatever helps you sleep at night. Speaking of which...”

Hermann glanced meaningfully at the wall clock.

“Yeah. I’ll go soon,” Newt said, making no movement to do so. His eyes wandered across the curtained windows behind Hermann’s head.

“Are you thinking about the conference?”

Newt shrugged. “Are you thinking about Orpheus?”

“It’s nonsense,” Hermann murmured, trying to see if he believed himself.

Newt stared at the curtains.

“The conference will be fine,” Hermann said.

“Yeah,” said Newt. “I’m just curious about this new CIA gadget. That’s all.”

Hermann frowned a little at Newt. Usually, the man’s curiosity translated into excitement, but he seemed preoccupied.

“Weeks hasn’t told you anything?”

“Not really,” said Newt. “He might not know anything. It’s a high-level thing. It might even be a Victor thing. I heard there’s going to be a treaty, the works.”

Something, some chord in his voice, suddenly woke in Hermann the idea that Newton was lying. He was hiding something. The idea came from nowhere, like a brick flung through a window—but now the window was smashed, and there was the brick. This was their life, after all; for all its comfortable routine, ordinary tiffs, and other shared intimacies, the world they lived in together was a world of secrets. There were some secrets Hermann could not share.

Hermann had a long-held superstition that there was something inside him which needed protection. Something that needed protection from external intercession, or perhaps something from which the world needed protection. This superstition was what had drawn him into the world of secret intelligence in the first place—not the intelligence, but the secrets, the guarding of secrets.

If his heart was an ocean, like anyone else’s, Newton had charted it. There was one last anchor Hermann guarded. He guarded it not for what it held, but for the security of its untouched existence.

Did Newt know that he was holding back? Hermann averted his eyes from Newton’s own pockets of secrecy—his dark labyrinthine flat, the experiments he did there. Hermann did not ask. Not out of consideration, but self-preservation.

So all he said was: “Are they even going to let you look at this ‘gadget’?”

“Do not disguise your envy as disparagement,” said Newt. “It’s very unattractive.”

Hermann rolled his eyes.

“Officially, according to my schedule, no. I’m just running workshops. The usual how-to shtick. For locals and my fellow Americans.”

When Hermann closed the journal a half an hour later, Newton was dozing with his head on Hermann’s lap. When he said softly, “Go home, don’t fall asleep here,” Newton murmured, “Uh-huh.” Some time later, when Hermann was settled in bed on his good side, one pillow between his knees and one behind his back, the bed creaked and Newt crawled in next to him. In the morning, he was gone.


	4. The Conference

**4\. The Conference**

FOR WHAT WAS NOW widely considered a highly productive professional partnership, Newt and Hermann’s acquaintance had begun in a rather quaint manner.

Hermann was born to a Jewish family in 1930 in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Bavaria. They fled Germany when he and his sister were small and settled outside London. His father Lars Gottlieb was a doctor, and an unforgiving sort of man. Conforming readily to the spirit of their new nation, he sent his children away to school. Hermann eventually found his way to mathematics, and then to Cambridge.

It was an old recruiter, a don named Thurston, who spotted Hermann at Cambridge. Thurston was an ageless German literature professor, and Gottlieb, reserved, intelligent, and multinational, caught his eye. He introduced Hermann to Victor, a war hero ten years his senior and a rising star in the Division. Victor took a liking to Hermann. He made the right introductions, handled the vetting and interviewing, and saw to it that, upon completion of his mathematics degree, Hermann Gottlieb entered training at GCHQ in Cheltenham. So began his illustrious cryptographic career, under Victor’s convivial eye.

Newt’s recruitment a few years earlier had been, characteristically, less passive. He was born to a large German-Jewish family in New York, on the Lower East Side, in 1932. An emotional and intellectual terror from a young age, like many child prodigies, his case was taken up by an affectionate science teacher. His parents were happy to hand him off, at the age of 12, into the care of MIT.

Seven years later, he was selected for a yearlong research fellowship at Oxford. A prodigy of American birth and German breeding, pursuing his doctorate in electrical engineering at the age of 19, he attracted attention on paper. On campus, his antics attracted even more. He burst in uninvited at parties to give speeches on archaeological history or the Riemann hypothesis, or withdrew abruptly from formal gatherings to tinker in his room, where, if rumors were to be believed, he was inventing a new kind of telescope, a cordless telephone system, a personal-use missile detection radar.

Such rumors, though surely false, attracted the network’s attention. Oxford’s venerable intelligence tradition was rich with both targets and recruits; unfortunately, as a result, barely trained new recruits were the ones to surveille the targets. Newt noticed his watchers. He figured out who they were. Then he marched up to one and demanded, with a hierarchical misunderstanding he would never outgrow, to be taken to their leader. He wanted a job.

Within two years, Newt was the star child of the Division’s Hardware department. Absurdly young, he was a hot poker in the seat of hardware’s pension-age engineers, slow old men with secret medals from the war. Newt’s mission was to drag the department out of the past and into the future, with no pause at the present, and though the veteran engineers fought him every inch, they were invigorated by this electrifying nuisance. With Newt in the hot seat, hardware churned out advances in surveillance technology, newer, faster, smaller.

Every couple of months, Newt went up to the Estate to train officers and ops on the new gear. It was at one of these workshops, a mild February weekend in 1962, that he was doing a puzzle under the table during a lull. It was the weekly number puzzle in the Sunday _Times_ , which he had pinched from the boarding house breakfast room that morning. He complained to his neighbor, a brightly dressed officer with a crooked jaw, that the _Times_ number puzzle had dropped sharply in quality since the new year.

“I used to spend all afternoon on these,” Newt said. “Now they take me 15 minutes.”

“That bad, is it?” said the officer.

“Awful,” Newt said with American frankness. “Either the puzzle department is under new management, or the old manager had a stroke.”

“Actually, he quit,” said the officer, who ran the German desk in London Headquarters and whose name was Victor. “I know him.”

“You do?” Newt said. “Why’d he quit?”

Victor leaned in confidingly. “His work’s gotten too busy.”

Catching his meaning with surprise, Newt exclaimed, “He works here?”

“As a matter of fact, I hired him myself,” Victor said with an easy smile.

Newt, not one for internal regulation, asked for the puzzlemaster’s workname and posting. He wanted to write him a letter thanking him for a consistent challenge. Victor, genial son of the old boys’ network, heir to mantles passed down simply by virtue of knowing the right people, was happy to hand over the information.

Hermann received the letter a week later, addressed to his workname and signed with a stranger’s initials, with surprise. Thus began a confidential correspondence under cover of pseudonyms.

*   *   *

Saturday, June 2nd, 1973

The Estate

The Estate was east of Norfolk, an hour’s drive from the Broads. It was by all appearances a country house, with a sizable collection of outbuildings and acres of fields and forests. An officer named Marsden had left it in trust to the Division sometime between the wars. His much younger wife, the imperious Frenchwoman Mrs. Marsden, became caretaker. For nearly forty years it had been the Division’s training ground, where operatives learned and officers refreshed their skills. Since the Bowen affair in 1963, its security clearance had been severely downgraded. It was now used primarily for temporary residence—a safe house, a place to debrief, and occasionally, a venue for diplomatic functions.

The conference with the Americans was Friday through Sunday. If all went well, it would be followed by a high-level meeting the next Saturday. It was top-tier only. The terms and stakes of the meeting were top secret, and so, widely known around the grounds.

Newt spent the first two days of the conference collecting intelligence. By Saturday he knew several things. He knew the CIA gadget was extremely valuable. He knew the Brits were trading something of equal importance for it. He knew where both were being kept: inside the conspicuously guarded stables.

Lucky for Newt, he was quartered in the boarding house, which was spitting distance from the stable. From this position, he had occasion to learn something else: Case Officer Raleigh Becket was in attendance.

He was not on the roster for Newt’s CO workshops. So what was he doing here? And why was he going in and out of the stables?

Becket was the Austrian head of station, if Newt’s memory was correct—which it always was. He was young, handsome, ex-army, hardly in his mid-thirties. Hermann had worked with him at some point. Becket never seemed like a spy to Newt, except in the most vulgar, Fleming sense. He was too conspicuous, too shiny.

Becket also had the distinction of being the only named officer in the file Newt had received in February. Over the last few months, Newt had given that file quite a bit of thought.

Newt returned from his Saturday workshops for the afternoon recess. Entering the dining room, he was accosted by the hovering Mrs. Marsden. She was a small, energetic elderly woman; age had not dimmed the vividness of her wardrobe. She still wore the same pearls Newt remembered.

“Newton, dear, how are you?” she asked. “I have been so busy, I have hardly talked to you—we have not been so busy here in years! Your room is comfortable? Your workshops are going well? Newton, you bad young man, you never visit me anymore. It gets so lonely out here, you know, without the trainings. You should ride up your motorcycle more. Bring that girlfriend, how is she?”

“Cait’s not my girlfriend,” Newt patiently reminded her. “Mrs. Marsden, don’t you know that I’m married?”

She gasped. “Married?”

“Yes! Married to my work!”

“Bah!” She slapped his arm with her ring-studded hand. “One of these days you must settle, Newton. You are getting old. You will not have this hair forever. You must use it to attract a wife before you lose it.”

Newt laughed.

Mrs. Marsden squeezed his arm. “This is why I miss your visits, Newton. You smile and laugh, not like these Englishmen—they never do. We French only laugh, we do not smile. Still, one misses it.”

Newt smiled fondly. “Mrs. Marsden, you’re such a flirt. Caitlin is doing well, though, thank you for asking. We play music together. We have a concert next week in London. You should come see us play.”

“London! London is not good for my lungs,” Mrs. Marsden said. “Or my headaches. Or my heart. Does Caitlin still work in the Black Chamber?”

Newt raised his eyebrows. _Is she losing her memory?_

“No, Mrs. M. She worked there _before_ she worked here. But she was fired. She was here when...”

“Ah, of course, of course.” Her face closed off abruptly, like blinds had fallen. “Terrible business,” she murmured, eyes roaming away from him.

“Yeah,” was all Newt came up with. Even to say his name to her felt like a vile insult. She was a proud woman, after all, and the Bowen affair had taken place on her watch.

“He was always good to me, you know,” she finally said, lifting her eyes to Newt’s. “Those boys, they always were. The twins and the tagalong. There were so many summers they spent here, training their recruits. I miss them all, the trainees. I miss seeing them grow. Most of all, do you know who I miss, Newton? That Charles. His ‘twin.’ And you know, I miss Victor too. It is like they are all gone.”

“Victor isn’t gone,” Newt said. “He’s here.”

“He is not,” Mrs. Marsden said. “Victor is gone.”

Newt looked away.

“Newton, mon cher, your room. It is comfortable? I am sorry to put you up in the attic with all the spiders, but I think the beds are more soft there.”

“It’s great,” Newt said, putting his hand on her arm. “Very cozy. I don’t think my neighbor much cares for me though.”

“Your neighbor? Mr. Rosewater? He was rude to you?”

Mrs. Marsden turned, squinting across the crowded dining room. She spotted him.

“Ah. There he is. By the French doors.”

“Is he American?” asked Newt.

“He’s _the_ American, mon cher. He is the liaison,” she said. “This is why I give him the nice rooms. But was he rude to you, Newton?”

“Oh—it was nothing,” Newt said, craning his neck to look at the liaison. He was thin and smooth, with the youthful vitality of American military bureaucrats. When he replied to someone’s greeting, Newt could see his gold fillings flash across the room. “Pounding on my door this morning asking if I had used up all the hot water. That’s all.”

“Hot water!” she said, scoffing. “He probably used it all up himself. These Americans. So decadent.”

“No wonder they hate the reds so much,” Newt said. “Do you know what his title is?”

“He is the R&D Director for the CIA,” Mrs. Marsden replied promptly.

“The whole CIA?”

“Yes,” Mrs. Marsden said. She shook her head. “I should have given him a room in the basement with his colleagues.”

*   *   *

What Victor had told Newt in 1962 was entirely true. Hermann had been forced to resign his enjoyable side job as puzzle editor because he was being fast-tracked for promotion in his top-secret posting in a top secret lab at Menwith Hill, North Yorkshire. There, GCHQ shared a surveillance base with the Americans, and their cryptography partnership was being championed by none other than Washington liaison Robert Bowen himself.

When he received Newt’s first letter, Hermann was close to drowning in this institutional whirlpool. He was paddling out in the waves without a map or star or white whale to keep him company, and so he did something peculiar and unadvisable with the letter: he answered it.

Within a month they were writing twice a week. They were careful to avoid work topics, particularly Hermann. His North Yorkshire flat was government-owned—their letters could be read at any time. His correspondent never asked about the particulars of his work, nor detailed his own, and Hermann appreciated his tacit respect of this boundary. From this unspoken understanding he extrapolated swaths more. Hermann roamed the slopes and swamps of his lonely psyche, plucking material for his letters; he mistook his sparse clippings for meaningful confessions, and he mistook his own footprints for his correspondent’s.

Back in London, Newt was invigorated by his challenging and clever correspondent—finally, he thought, he had found a peer in his field; not some arthritic engineer and not some hungry young ladder-climber. The puzzlemaster seemed equal to every topic Newt threw at him (except modern music): he appreciated Newt’s speculations on paleontology, his inflammatory opinions on classical composers, his bizarre application of subjective idealism to the Space Race. The puzzlemaster returned with some fascinating ideas on the philosophical implications of transfinite math and the first compelling case for opera that Newt had ever heard. They also shared a passion for the Riemann hypothesis, and Newt divulged the truth of his personal project at Oxford—he had been trying to build a calculating machine to find Riemann Zeros.

Sitting on his small wrought iron balcony above the courtyard in North Yorkshire, Hermann spent whole evenings drafting his replies. Newt devoured each on his crowded commute, drafted his reply in his head all day at work, and typed it out in a single draft when he got home. For Newt, their correspondence was the natural extension of the Sunday puzzle. Hermann did not view it with the same pragmatism.

*

Hermann was one of the specialists on the Division team being prepared for the new American cryptographic partnership. It was all part of Bowen’s project to bring the American and British networks into closer alliance. London smiled on Robert Bowen like a proud father, and as he drew up the charters in Washington, glasses were clinking in Moscow. But abruptly, in January of 1963, the Americans backed out of the partnership. A discreet emissary flew in from Washington and met with the deputy head of the Foreign Office in a soundproof room in Whitehall; when they emerged, the charter was scrapped and Bowen recalled to London.

His program terminated, Dr. Gottlieb was recalled from North Yorkshire. After ten months, Newt’s correspondent fell abruptly silent; his letters went unanswered for one week, then two, then returned, roughed up and stamped: “No Forwarding Address.”

*   *   *

1973

Newt returned to the attic for the late afternoon recess. Was his neighbor really _the_ American liaison? That would be a stroke of luck. He walked by Mr. Rosewater’s door on his way to his room, and paused.

It was ajar, which meant he was inside. Or was he? Newt stood still, but heard nothing within. He couldn’t see anything interesting through the crack. If he just poked his head in…

Footsteps sounded on the stairs and Newt quickly resumed forward motion. He went into his room and shut the door.

He collapsed on his twin bed under the eaves and read _Fellowship_ for a while. Then he slid off the edge of the mattress into the narrow space between the bed and the wall. Lying on the scratchy carpet, he investigated the crossbeam under the headboard. A handful of initials were carved into the wood, some of them forty years old. He gazed at _C.R._ , wondering if it was Charles Rennie, Hermann’s old CO.

Newt settled on his side and watched a spider at work between the beams. Lying there, he spun thoughts of Becket and the file, the treaty, the stable, Mr. Rosewater’s gold teeth. He dozed off in the stuffy attic air.

Newt woke to the sound of footsteps in the creaky hallway. “Check the other rooms, will you?” said an American voice, and he heard someone open the door next to his. Mr. Rosewater was home.

It was still light, but Newt, dazed, could not see the clock from the floor. His mouth was very dry. He was about to stand when his door opened. From under the bed, he saw shiny patent leather shoes stop, then close the door again. “Empty,” said Raleigh Becket’s voice.

Newt heard Becket’s feet walk next door, then Mr. Rosewater’s door closing and locking.

Awake now, he clambered as quietly as possible onto his bed. The foot of his bed was against Rosewater’s wall. He knelt at the end and pressed his ear to the wall. Too muffled.

As carefully as he could, he climbed off the bed and crept across the room to the dresser. Fortunately, it was a small room; unfortunately, it was a creaky attic. Teeth gritted, he unbuckled his demo kit and rooted around until he found what he was looking for: his mechanic’s stethoscope.

Newt crept back to the bed and put the stethoscope into his ears. In a pinch, the analog tricks still worked best. He put the other end to the wall and listened.

“...the transmitter blueprints.”

“Of course. But I gotta say, I’m much less interested in the blueprints than in the Greenwich file.”

“Yes, sir?”

“He was your guy, wasn’t he, Becket?”

“Birch?”

“Who? No—Greenwich.”

“Oh. Oh, yes, sir. I was his contact.”

“Will I get a look at that file? Maybe even the unredacted version?”

“Yes, sir,” said another voice. “The courier is bringing it up along with the blueprints tonight.”

“Good. I want to see it before the recess. And I’ll make sure you gentlemen get a look at the transducer before tomorrow night.”

There was a pause, or something was happening that Newt couldn’t make out.

“Right. Great. I’ll see you fellas tomorrow evening.”

“Sir.”

 _Fellas?_ Who was the other speaker?

There was a sound of someone standing up, and then footsteps to Rosewater’s door. It unlocked and Becket walked by his bedroom door and down the stairs.

Newt took the stethoscope out of his ears. He slid off the bed and wedged himself in the gap again, scrunching himself in between the bed and the wall, legs folded, chin on knees, thinking.

The conversation all but confirmed his suspicions: this CIA-Division tech exchange involved the transmitter he had glimpsed in February. Becket’s presence was the first definite clue—but the mention of Greenwich made it certain.

_The transducer..._

Newt needed to take some precautions first. He checked on the spider (web complete, spider MIA), then unfolded himself and climbed out over his bed. He grabbed his jacket and wallet and barreled out the door—and nearly ran right into someone.

“Excuse me,” snapped Preston. He was coming out of Mr. Rosewater’s room.

“Oh!—Preston?”

“Dr. Geiszler,” said Victor’s assistant. “Do you have some business up here?”

“Sleeping?” said Newt. “This is my room.”

Preston threw a glance at the room behind him, and Newt became aware of a quiet conversation going on inside. He followed Preston’s glance through the half-open door.

Victor was in there.

Newt paled slightly. Had he been in there the whole time, without saying a word?

He looked back at Preston, who was giving him a warning look.

“This is Mr. Rosewater’s room, isn’t it?” said Newt.

“Chatting with the guests, are we?”

“Not as such,” said Newt, putting his hands in his pockets. “We had some words about the hot water this morning.”

There was the sound of a chair from inside the room, and Preston flashed Newt another warning look.

“I suggest you keep from asking bothering the American liaison, Geiszler. I don’t need to remind you how important this conference is.”

“Right,” said Newt. For a second he had been curious to see the Vice Chief outside his office, for once, but then self-preservation won out. “I’ll be going then.” He started walking backwards.

“Where?”

Footsteps sounded from behind the door.

“Into town,” said Newt. “To call H—ome. Call home. And do some errands. Do you need anything, sir? Stamps? Smokes?”

“Thank you, no,” said Preston coldly.

“Right then,” said Newt, and turned tail down the stairs just as he heard the door open.

He hastened off the estate and into town. It was a short ride on the Bonneville, and the cool spring air calmed his nerves.

*   *   *

In January 1963, Hermann returned to London. Victor seized the chance to have his protégé transferred into his section. Bowen, too, was back in London for the first time in a few years. Following the unknown unpleasantness with the Americans, the Division cleared Bowen and petulantly promoted him (thanks in no small part to Victor’s lobbying) to Vice Chief.

Back in London, Dr. Gottlieb’s focus shifted from the advancement of Division encoding methods to the unraveling of the Razvedka’s. Victor had an exciting new project to put him on.

A year before, a Soviet cipher clerk had defected, codenamed Raspberry. In his lengthy debrief in a Canadian hotel room, Source Raspberry revealed that there had been a manufacturing error with the Russians’ onetime cipher pads. They had accidentally manufactured duplicates of a set. 10,000 formerly unique encryption keys were now circulating in duplicate. On their own, messages from a onetime pad were unbreakable. But two messages from the same encryption key could, if matched, be deciphered.

Source Raspberry said most of them were in use in Eastern Europe. Victor was, at the time, chief of the German desk, and Bowen handed him the reins on the so-called “twotime pads.” The project: construct a system to detect reused encryption keys. What they needed was not just a quick-calculating computer, but a computer with memory. At the time, no such machine existed in Britain.

Victor christened the operation Project Blueberry and assigned it to the Hardware lab. He was still in need of a mathematician when Hermann transferred back to London. Victor was quick to add his protegé to his pet project. At their semiweekly status meeting, Victor introduced Dr. Gottlieb to Project Blueberry’s lead engineer, Dr. Newton Geiszler.

It had been two months. Newt was confident that the puzzlemaster would write him back eventually. Given their work, Newt reasoned, he had probably been deployed to somewhere distant and unreachable. For Newt, the mystery was on the back burner. And Hermann had no idea where in their vast organization to look for his anonymous correspondent.

That day, they shook hands as strangers.

They took an instant dislike to each other.

A week of intense friction followed. Then, in their third status meeting, Hermann spat out what Newt recognized, with a terrible sinking heart, as a turn of phrase from one of his letters. Hermann snapped at him, in front of everyone, to “cease his American palavering,” and Newt saw in his mind’s eye the longhand script complaining about a colleague at Menwith Hill base using the exact same terms. This man too was a cryptographer recently returned from a top-secret posting in North Yorkshire. This was him, Newt realized. This was his correspondent—and he hated Newt.

*

Hermann reacted poorly to the news.

It is a hard climb up out of the gulf between reality and fiction; Hermann refused to try. He stayed at the bottom, subsuming his disproportionately crushing disappointment. Newt received, but could not parse, the distress signals he was broadcasting. Why was he so upset? Hermann himself did not know why. The real Newton had barged in and obliterated his own vague, idealized shadow. That imaginary person vanished before Hermann’s eyes into the realm of forgotten fiction.

Newt had no idea how to deal with Hermann’s silent but intense reaction. With equal but noisier intensity, he focused everything on their work.

In circuit diagrams and failed prototypes, reams of data, algorithm after algorithm, they circled each other. Failure was followed by minor success, which was followed by major setback and days of arguing. Over two months, Newt designed a skull for the brain Hermann was writing. In March, Newt and his team began to build it. By the end of March, the Blueberry was complete. Its memory storage unit took up an entire room. Hermann installed his painstakingly constructed code, and it went online.

The Blueberry was designed to detect an OTP match, not to decipher it. Copious amounts of data—thousands upon thousands of undeciphered enemy messages—had to be fed in before a duplicate could be discovered. When one was, the computer’s output would be the transmission IDs of the messages with matching keys. These two enciphered messages were to be taken upstairs, to the busy coding bay, where a clerk would decipher it by hand.

For weeks, under the anxious eyes of its creators, the Blueberry swallowed and digested every OTP-encoded message since WWII. After a week, it had processed and stored every message up to 1950. By the end of week two it had reached 1959, and Hermann’s apprehension had nearly reached the breaking point. But it was here that they got their first match. An OTP from 1942, reused in 1959. The operation was a success. Their machine worked.

Up until then, Newt had harbored a vague hope of reconciliation. This hope was fused to the success of the project: if he could build the Blueberry for Hermann, that would make it up to him.

What “it” was, Newt still didn’t know.

Nor did Hermann. But he didn’t stay to find out.

Newt returned to the lab from the final debrief meeting to find Hermann emptying his temporary desk. The sight hit him in the gut. With no idea what to say, he aimed at something unimportant—said in the meeting—and began throwing darts at it wildly. Hermann in turn called him unprofessional, like always, and Newt told him he was impossible to work with, like always, even though it wasn’t true. It wasn’t true at all—the opposite was true. Working with him had been better than anyone, better than he had imagined from his mythical correspondent, and he could not say so, he could not say it. And Hermann, by all evidence, did not feel the same.

Three weeks later, Hermann was in East Berlin. Vice Chief Bowen was sending Charles Rennie on a surveillance mission, and Rennie needed a technician with coding expertise who spoke German. Hermann had volunteered. An unidentified object had crashed in the countryside, east of Berlin.

*   *   *

1973

In Hermann’s flat on Saturday night, the phone rang. He let it ring once. There was no second ring. He waited, and after a thirty-second pause it rang again. He picked up and listened: three clicks, a two-second pause, then four taps. The line went dead.

“Typical,” he muttered irritably, almost before hanging up.

Outside the air was cool and foggy, with a humid tang of rain. He was still buttoning his coat as he hurried out his front door and limped around the corner. The phone in the booth was already ringing.

“Four minutes is _not_ enough time to get to this one, you nitwit,” he said angrily into the mouthpiece, shutting the door behind him. “I barely made it.”

“God, you’re old,” replied Newton’s tinny voice. “Who even says ‘nitwit’ anymore? Old on two counts.”

“Need I remind you—”

“Focus, Hermann, I don’t have very much change. I need a favor.”

Hermann sighed in a put-upon manner that said, Go ahead.

“I need you to hide something for me.”

“Oh, excellent. Of course, Newton, please help me jeopardize my career. And yours as well. My pleasure. Do go on.”

“Yeesh, relax,” said Newton. “It’s a personal thing, not a work thing.”

“As if there is any line between the two,” Hermann snapped.

 _If only you knew,_ Newt thought. “Bad day huh?” he said instead. “Did one of our colleagues do something untoward, like ask about your weekend plans?”

“Please get on with it.”

“It’s in my apartment,” Newton said, sounding like he was looking around. “In the spot. Green box.”

“What spot?” Hermann said impatiently.

“You know where I mean!”

“I do not make a habit of visiting your nightmare of a flat, as you well know.”

“Hermann, I’m not saying over the phone, okay? You’ll figure out where it is. Green box. Don’t touch anything else. Especially not in the workshop. And don’t forget about the lights.”

“I won’t,” Hermann said, remembering the time he did forget about them.

“And once you’ve got it, can you—”

“Yes, yes, I’ll take care of it.”

“And one more thing?”

“Yes?” said Hermann shortly.

“Would you check on my birds?”

“Jake has them?”

“Yes. Just make sure he has enough food and everything.”

“Yes—fine,” said Hermann. “Are you going to tell me what all this is about?”

“Not over the phone,” Newton said again.

“Then will you—”

“Not via post either. Just wait til I get back. I’ll explain.”

“On Monday night?” said Hermann, aiming for a put-upon delivery but delivering something more like gloom.

“Aw,” said Newt, with an air of realization. “You’re cranky ‘cause you miss me.”

“Is that all, Newton?”

“Yes, th—”

Hermann hung up.

*

He stood in the booth a moment longer, nervously running his thumbnail up and down the ribbed metal phone cord.

The street outside was empty. Hermann took a detour to return to their block via Wheaten Street. Personal _,_ he had said, a _personal_ thing _._ Hermann did not believe him.

He saw no watchers outside Newton’s building, but walked by it without stopping and went home.

Instead of going upstairs to his flat, he descended into the basement. He exited the back door and hurried round the periphery of the courtyard. He made a quick check in the alley, found it empty, and crossed it. He hurried around the other courtyard to the back door of Newton’s building, and with his copied key and a last look around, he let himself in.

Hermann climbed to the third floor. He did not like going to Newton’s flat. The disorder of his laboratory office was one thing (and what a thing it was). But the chaos of his flat had an undefinable menace. Newton called _him_ paranoid, thought Hermann (trying one lock, failing, cursing the man under his breath, trying the second, wishing for a world where his partner did not have three separate locks with three separate keys on his one front door), yet it was _Newton_ who had turned his flat into a bugged and bear-trapped labyrinth.

Hermann turned the doorknob and slid his thumb over the bolt so it would not pop back out (if it did, an alarm would sound), stepped inside, and carefully closed the door. He picked up the little wooden slivers that had fallen from the lock bolts and pocketed them—another security signal, to replace before he left. If the slivers were out, the owner would know the locks had been opened and re-closed in his absence.

Newton’s combination of espionage tradecraft and near-farcical mad scientist tactics unnerved Hermann. It unnerved him, too, he thought, removing his shoes and stepping, socked, over the tripwire just past the welcome mat, that he had so much security for no apparent reason. If, God forbid, some inquiry did ever give the Division reason to search his home, their suspicions would be immediately rise to red alert, simply from the outrageous apparatus of the place—an apparatus to hide nothing.

Hermann flipped the switch outside the living-room-turned-bedroom to stop the sensor-activated floodlights from blaring. In typical Geiszlerian style the rooms had been shuffled and repurposed. Newt’s unmade bed and half-open dresser were in the front room. The wide street-facing windows were half-blocked by an overflowing personal bookshelf full of records and pulp science fiction. Music leaked from a radio in another room. Hermann turned on his flashlight.

It was very annoying of Newton not to tell him where to find it, though in a way Hermann desired the challenge. The box was probably in a sentimental or somehow personally significant place, because Newton was never properly trained as an op. So, stepping over dirty discarded clothes, he looked inside of Newton’s upright piano, the bench, his empty guitar case. He felt behind all the books. He removed _What’s Going On_ from the turntable and checked for secret compartments in the record player. He opened the back of the television and found a short-range signal delay jammer, of Newton’s design but stolen from work. The delay was set to two hours, he noted. Newton had probably installed it so as to watch television shows later than when they were broadcast.

Hermann shone his light on the door of the original bedroom, now a home lab, locked. The music was coming from inside—Newton’s preferred pirate radio station, he guessed from the sound of Won't Get Fooled Again.

The workshop was the core of the bizarre little apartment. Hermann had never been inside. An apprehension of untraced origin tugged him away when he looked at its lock. Had Newton given him the key? Was it on his heavy keyring?

Hermann chose not to find out.

Instead he entered the kitchen, wondering how different the growth rate of communications technology in the British intelligence service would have been if it received the full brunt of Newton’s interest. Fortunately for communists everywhere, his laser-strength-interest remained laser-pointed at his personal tinkering.

The kitchen was primarily a greenhouse and a storage space. Hermann’s flashlight passed over a large telescope and a cannibalized motorcycle engine. Over the counter and sink hung a truly impressive wall of foliage. His light revealed a hose hooked up to the faucet. Probably hooked up to a timer. One mystery— _Who waters Newton’s plants while he’s gone?—_ closed. Another mystery— _How, if at all, does he drink water?—_ opened.

And does he eat? _Then I'll get on my knees and pray_... sang Roger Daltrey from the other side of the wall... _We don't get fooled again..._ Otherwise, all was silence. No furnace or pipes hummed. Nor did the refrigerator.

The refrigerator.

Hermann threw open the door. No light turned on. Unplugged and empty. He stifled a snort at this— _Freeloader_ , he thought, not without fondness—and opened the drawers. Empty.

He felt around the floor of the refrigerator. There—a clasp.

From below a dummy panel in the base of Newton’s unused refrigerator, he drew a small slim box. It was green. Triumphant, he replaced the panel, shut the fridge door, and examined the box by flashlight.

The green box weighed a couple ounces and rattled enticingly. The box had a combination lock, four digits, which Hermann opened easily. He overturned it into his hand.

A small aluminum object fell out. It was gunmetal gray, curved like an ear or a waning moon. He settled it in the center of his palm. It fit like it was meant to be there. He thought he could recognize Newton’s handiwork, but it was neater than his usual designs. It was entirely closed up in its metal shell—the only visible part was a button on the inner curve and a collapsed antenna. If it was a radio, it was probably a transmitter, AM, minuscule range. Unless it was one of multiple components.

Hermann put it back in the box, snapped it shut, and left the apartment, resetting all the alarms and signals as he went.


	5. The Transducer

**5\. The Transducer**

Sunday, June 3rd  
The Estate

SOON AFTER SUNSET on Sunday night, Newt left the boarding house by the back door.

Newt strode through the wet grass, which was growing quickly, still unmowed. The boarding house was only a hundred yards or so from the stable, but he took the long way round behind the big house. It was a chilly night, and the air was wet and heavy. Night had come on quickly and mercilessly. There was no moon.

He circled around the big house from the back and gazed up at the lighted windows. He could see the uncurtained window of the upper parlor, and see Mrs. Marsden puttering inside. He walked on between the beds of just-blooming peonies, keeping a good distance from house.

Reaching the end of the flowerbeds, he stopped by a hibiscus bush. Through the last first-floor window, he saw a dark back and broad shoulders. Becket turned around, holding papers in one hand and a glass in the other. He was talking to two people—Victor and Rosewater, if the schedule Newt had purloined was correct. He checked his watch. It was 8:37. He’d just set it by the clock in the boarding house dining room. If they kept to their schedule, they would be in that meeting until 9:15. He had plenty of time.

Newt circled around the front of the house. The wide front terrace, dotted with welcoming deck chairs, was deserted—the night was too cold. At last he reached the gravel driveway. He hurried back in the direction he had come, towards the boarding house and stables.

The stable lay low and long like a bluff in the hill. Newt paused on the edge of the driveway, turning to look back at the big house one more time. He saw lights, but no people. He saw the big clock on the tower, but could not read it through the mist.

One light hung over the big front doors. In the mist, its white light made a solid cone over the entrance. It was best to walk in boldly, with no visible qualms. People usually overlooked a confident snoop. So he took off his glasses, put them in his pocket, straightened his coat and, with a last glance around, walked confidently towards the light. Crickets and frogs sang from the tall grass growing in tufts along the path. He ignored their warning song.

The inside of the stable was a cavern of poorly lit brown and gray blobs. The air was heavy with dust and hay, as if animals had actually lived in it some time during the last 50 years. As Newt walked forward, some blobs resolved themselves into a metal folding table. Behind it sat two vacant-eyed young corporals in U.S. Army fatigues, with a small radio murmuring on the table between them.

The fatigues seemed, to Newt, extreme. They looked equally unimpressed with him.

“At ease, gentlemen,” Newt said, approaching jauntily.

“Who exactly are you?” said the one on the right.

“Me? I’m the plumber,” he said.

They stared blankly.

“Wow, tough crowd,” Newt said, and clapped his hands together in a businesslike manner. “I need to take a look at the transducer, fellas. Make sure everything’s ready for tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow?”

“Yes.”

“Can we see some authorization, sir?” said the one on the left, with an accent of doubt on the ‘sir.’

“Authorization?” said Newt, playing it amused. “I built the damn thing myself.”

They stared blankly.

 _Should have just snuck in a back window,_ Newt thought.

“We haven’t seen you before, sir.”

“What? Me? Of course you haven’t,” said Newt, throwing his back into some blustering. “I just got here. By charter plane! And you ask me for authorization? Like you don’t know who I am? Why don’t you call up Mr. Rosewater and ask _him?_ Ask _him_ about my authorization, and see how he—”

“Sir,” said the one on the right, cutting him off, “We can’t let you in without ID. It’s that simple.”

“Oh,” said Newt, settling down. “ID? That’s what you want?”

They stared.

“Of course. My mistake. I’ve got that.”

Newton produced his wallet and pulled out a card.

He put his CIA building pass onto the table and slid it to them. “Sorry. Here you go.”

It was his picture, and his number, and it was genuine. It was just that “TEMPORARY” in large red letters had been covered with circular color-code stickers, the kind security guards love and that army corporals are unlikely to know. And the name the name under his picture said “Neilson Garrett.”

“Thank you Mr. Garrett,” said the one on the right, sliding it back. “Was that so hard?”

“You’ll need to sign in,” said the one on the left, indicating a log.

“So sorry. Of course.” Newt took his pass back and signed the log with his right hand and his fake name. Squinting to read, he noted Raleigh Becket’s name above, in at 8:20 and out at 8:31.

“It’s 8:47,” the guard on the right said, checking his watch.

Newt filled it in accordingly. He resisted the urge to salute facetiously and instead apologized again before heading down the dark hallway. He’d been issued the temporary ID card on a business trip to Langley two years before, and made some alterations to it since. A disastrous trip, overall. At least one good thing had come of it.

With the door closed behind him, Newt pulled out his glasses and put them back on. The stable corridor was long and unlit. Behind the white bars of every stall was a pocket of pitch black. The only light came from the window at the end of the corridor. As he passed stall after empty stall, the uneven boards beneath his feet turned to temporary plywood, then abruptly to concrete. Then he was pushing opening the door at the end of the corridor. It creaked like a rusty spring, making him jump.

Then Newt stepped inside and saw it.

*   *   *

In the summer of 1963, both of them were exiled from London. Newt was put on full-time training and workshop duty in East Anglia. Some mania was possessing the service, and they were dispatching ops almost faster than they could train them. The frenzy came from the top, the untraced spasms of Vice Chief Bowen’s anxiety as the Americans closed their net around him.

At the Estate, Newt was being reckless. His technical workshops were disorganized and his trainee lectures were barely comprehensible. He drank late into the night on the roof with Lightcap, and later after she went to bed. His poor job performance did not get him sent home, because Victor had asked for him to be kept out of London for a while.

Hermann, meanwhile, was on foreign assignment for the first time in his career. By day, he was a university adjunct in East Berlin. By night he conducted the analytical side of a dangerous surveillance operation on Wagner Airbase.

Cover was easy, for a German-born academic. By day, Hermann taught one class while Raleigh Becket, a young but capable op, led the surveillance mission on Wagner Airbase. By night, Hermann was the technical help.

All was overseen by case officer Charles Rennie, crooked old hand and war hero. Robert Bowen had discovered Rennie in occupied Paris, already a con artist of impressive repute, glad-handing German soldiers. He was a natural recruit, and he’d never lost his taste for the grift. He and Bowen looked oddly alike, and they used this passing resemblance to their operational advantage—people called them the Twins. After the war, Victor made three, and they went to Istanbul.

Ten years on, while his comrades Victor and Bowen climbed floors in London, Rennie still preferred to stay in the field. Hermann was fairly certain this was because he was turning untaxed profits behind the Iron Curtain, but he had a streak of turn-of-the-century adventurer about him too. So, at home, Victor and Bowen watched his back and made sure he got the best postings.

Shut up in his miserable little flat, Hermann worked by lamplight into the early hours of the morning. Whatever he had fled in London had followed him here. He shuttled from depressed campus to depressed flat locked in a state of perpetual fight-or-flight. Fearfully, he would recall the distrustful looks of his university colleagues, strangers on the street. Bitterly, he would recall losing his composure some late night in the lab and scathingly saying, "Newton, you are not at all what I expected," and Newton's reply—defiant but hurt—"Then lower your expectations." He could hardly eat. The strain of fear and the strain of guilt were two hands on his throat. He crawled into bed late every night, and lay exhausted but awake; he awoke late in the oppressive sunlight, which grew hotter with each passing week.

Newt did not know the nature of his former correspondent’s mission. He still did not know it today—Hermann had never explained it.

At the same time Hermann was deciphering by lamplight, Newt was drinking with Caitlin Lightcap on the roof of the big house on the Estate. Sometimes he would hang backwards over the edge of the parapet, Cait holding his ankles, and watch the dark green fields reel backwards into the sky.

The incident for which he had been exiled had occurred in early May. Newt had barged into Section Chief Victor’s office. He demanded to know why Dr. Gottlieb, of all people, was being dispatched to East Berlin. Victor did not share his concern—to him, this mission was a step up for his protégé. With rising hysteria, Newt begged Victor not to send him. It was too late, Victor said—and anyway, Gottlieb had asked to go. Pleading turned to shouting, then cursing. Then he’d found himself transferred. When Caitlin asked, under the thin July moonlight, what was really wrong, he broke down saying it was nothing, not important at all. 

*   *   *

1973

The room appeared at first to be a machine room of some kind. It was populated by mountainous shapes shrouded in canvas, ranging around the dim room like ghosts. There was only one light, which was suspended over a dining table by a string. The table was old and unvarnished, surrounded by six bentwood Windsor chairs. On it sat a glass carafe and six glasses, all clean and empty. The tall carafe gleamed like a beacon in the dull room, and drew attention to the fact that this worn and rustic furniture had, unlike the room, no dust upon it.

Newt, walking slowly over the uneven floor, absorbed little of this. He approached the table, pulled like a moth by two items on it: glass document cases, one at each end of the table.

He reached the table, the light sloughed off the angled glass, and he saw the blueprint inside the case. His approach quickened, and he almost touched the glass in excitement, but stopped himself. It was the transmitter blueprint—as familiar to him now as all the blueprints of his own design.

Newt spent a moment reveling in the vindication. He’d known it. He was right. This _was_ what they were offering to the Americans.

And what were they offering in return?

With a last loving glance, he rounded the table and examined the other case. _The Transducer,_ read a helpful label. The case contained more specs, which looked much more complicated at first glance, but his attention was arrested by the other item in the case: a rubber ear, containing a tiny black insert.

Newt pulled his sleeves down over his fingers and carefully lifted the glass with his sleeves as gloves. He picked up the ear and lifted the tiny black thing out.

 _The Transducer_. He squinted at it. It was shiny and sleek, vaguely cylindrical, about the size of a beetle. It had little legs at one end and a small wire at the other—an antenna?—making it look like a tiny satellite. He glanced at the diagram, but was too impatient to read it. It had been inside the rubber ear antenna-end first, so he put it into his left ear antenna-end first.

He did it without thinking. At no point did he stop and wonder whether it was safe or smart. He didn’t know what it was; he just knew that it was for ears, and that he had ears.

It fit. It was so miniscule that it was hard to manipulate, so he poked at it until it felt settled. He wiggled his ear a little, then waited.

Nothing happened.

Was it on? Oh, shit, he had forgotten to turn it on. He tipped his head like a swimmer and shook his ear by the lobe.

It didn’t move.

Frowning, Newt leaned further. He poked his pinky finger into his ear and jiggled. The transducer did not budge. He scratched it with his pinky fingernail, and caught a shallow ridge. Then he yelped in pain.

Four needle points of pain burst in his ear canal, right inside his tragus. He jerked his finger away, breathing through his teeth. He looked at his finger—there was a tiny drop of blood.

He exhaled, but his breath was coming fast. The pain was mostly gone, but the thing was definitely stuck. The little legs, he thought. They must have sprung out. _God damn Americans and their god damn torture fetish,_ he thought.

It occurred to him then and for the first time that perhaps this was _not_ surveillance tech at all. It _was_ American made. It was not impossible that it was a torture device.

 _But why would the Brits want it?_ he thought, panicking. It couldn’t be. What could his transmitter have to do with a torture device?

He looked quickly down at his watch. 9:01.

 _Oh, you’re going to be in so much trouble,_ he thought in a voice not unlike his partner’s, shoving the rubber ear into his pocket and looking around the room for something long, thin and metal. Wire. wire. _God dammit._ How hard could it be to find wire in a barn?

 _Are you going to rupture your ear canal by ripping this thing out?_ he thought to himself as he made for a canvas shape and yanked its cover up. It was a tool bench, thank the lord. He started opening drawers.

 _I’ve got two ears for a reason,_ he thought frantically, panting, opening another drawer full of mouse nests and slamming it shut. That was when he heard footsteps.

Newt gasped and dove under the tool bench, pulling the canvas back down behind him. The footsteps reached the door and pushed it open with a creak.

There was a pause. Then footsteps walked, slowly, across the wooden floor. They were coming from the left—Newt, disoriented by his muffled ear, realized they had not come in through the main door, where he’d entered. They had come in from the back.

The visitor approached the table, then stopped again. Newt was holding his breath. _You’re dead. You’re fired. You’re dead and fired. Hermann will kill you. You’re dead._

Then the visitor strode, businesslike, over to the table. He heard a chair move, then an inhale across teeth. Whoever it was whispered something. Newt couldn’t hear what.

Then there was a wordless noise of frustration, followed by a horrible _smash_ of glass breaking on the floor. Newt clapped a hand over his own mouth.

A shard of glass bounced and skidded under the edge of the canvas and glinted at Newt. He squeezed his eyes shut.

Something indistinct happened, but he didn’t really track it because his hearing was not at its best, and he was trying not to hyperventilate. Then the footsteps walked swiftly across the room, back the way they’d come, and closed the door.

After a time, Newt could only hear crickets and frogs, muffled and in mono. He slowly opened his eyes.

He crawled out from under the canvas, dizzy in the light. He checked his watch—9:12. He stumbled across the room in the direction the visitor had left from. If there was a back exit, he was taking it.

*   *   *

In August 1963, after nearly four months abroad, Hermann returned to London for a short bureaucratic visit. He pleaded family business to the university, took a Friday off, and boarded a plane to Sweden with his East German passport; in the Stockholm airport he sealed it in an envelope and posted express it to his post office box in London, then went into a bathroom and unstitched his English passport from the lining of his suitcase, pinned the lining back, presented the passport to the ticket agent, and flew to London.

He was on-edge in London. The whole weekend was an August downpour. He turned every corner at headquarters with apprehension, expecting to meet Newton at any turn. But he did not see him. He felt relieved, then, when unresolved, reckless.

He looked up his address and went to his flat.

But Newt did not answer his door, because he was not there. So Hermann went down his slick stone steps in the pouring rain, and into the phone booth in front of Newt’s building. Hermann dialed the Division directory, and was put through to the Training Estate.

*

Rain hammered on the roof. Droplets drove down the panes, bright pin lights against the black night. They talked on the phone for an hour. Hermann ran out of change and they said goodbye. He hung up and stood in silence for a few moments in the booth, listening to the rain and the cars going by. It struck him that he did not know what to do with this reconciliation. He considered going home to his flat and writing a letter, but then thought he had better wait a day or two.

Hermann returned to East Berlin on Monday. He received a letter from Newt, and cancelled an appointment he had made before his trip. He wrote Newt a reply. Summer turned to fall and they rekindled their epistolary relationship. Their letters were less fervent, and less constructed, because they were now, more or less, on the same page. And Hermann was vindicated in his long-held but long-unacknowledged conviction: that Newton, by his letters, was impossible not to fall in love with.

*

Fall drifted into winter, and then suddenly in December, the Bowen crisis struck. Newton had been just recently transferred back to London, being excess personnel on the semi-seasonal Estate campus. But Hermann was out in the cold in East Berlin; every network Bowen knew of was rolled up within a week, and Bowen knew Rennie’s intimately.

Newt had no idea, still, how Hermann had escaped. He didn’t know what had happened in East Berlin. He knew it was bad. Rennie had been killed in the chaos; Becket had gone underground for several months. But Hermann had, somehow, made it out.

On the Sunday morning, Hermann had called Newt long-distance continental collect and asked him, in a blank voice, to pick him up at Reading Station at 7:30 PM. Newt, who had been in a state since the news broke, said “Yes,” hung up, and briefly sobbed with relief. Eight hours later he was at the station.

Newt took Hermann’s bag under feeble protestation (his only bag was his briefcase) and led him outside to the street. He furiously crumpled the ticket on the windshield of his illegally parked car and pitched it into the gutter, then drove them both home—to Newt’s flat.

He lived in Kenton then, though not on Wheaten Street. Hermann said nothing about the destination because they both knew it wasn’t safe. Nowhere was. But Newt’s was safer than his and anyway, in a matter of days maybe none of it would matter. The crisis was absolute. For all they knew, they’d be unemployed by tomorrow; maybe arrested; maybe killed by Razvedka agents who had learned their names from Bowen’s very lips.

On the steps outside his door Newt fumbled with the keys while Hermann stood painfully still, ostensibly keeping watch but looking, Newt knew, at nothing outside his mind. Glancing down at his keys, Newt saw Hermann’s white-knuckled hand clutching the handle of his briefcase. It was subtly shaking. Newt looked up quickly at Hermann, who met his gaze with a look of open fear. Newt just shook his head. “It’s okay,” he said, “Almost there.” He opened the door and held it open for Hermann to step through.

When he turned around from bolting his many locks, Hermann was still just standing there in the narrow hall, coat on, shoes on, briefcase in one hand, cane in the other. Newt stepped in closer because the walls were pushing them in, caught his gaze and drew it up. “What is it?” he said, and Hermann said, “I thought we had more time.” He looked down and said again, “I thought I had more time,” the words trailing away to nothing as Newt put his hand on Hermann’s, telling him to put the briefcase down. Up this close, he could see that Hermann had lost weight in Germany.

Hermann did not move. Newt remembered it now as odd, that moment of self-doubt—rare for the Hermann he knew today, the Hermann who had since grown into someone much more sincere.

This Hermann had lived alone in his head for a long, long time.

And in that moment they both knew that if he had his way, he would have gone on stalling forever.

So it was Newt who stepped in close, into the silent space that surrounded Hermann, unbuttoned his coat, slid it off his shoulders, and hung it up on the hook beside his own. And then he put his hands on Hermann’s arms, steadying him or himself or both, and kissed him. After a year and a half of waiting it felt like something newer and stranger than he’d ever imagined. Hermann kissed slow, like he was just trying to catch his breath.

He stayed until the all-call on Thursday night. They returned to a deserted headquarters to find Victor at the collapsing center, lighting a match to cleanse it with fire.

*

The inquest was conducted by Military Intelligence, their sister service and rival; there was no one else to do it. The upper management of the Division was almost completely annihilated, save for Victor and the Chief. Three-quarters of the employees were corrupted, and purged. Either they were turned, or blown, and useless. Many were arrested. The Estate inquest was most intense of all. Caitlin Lightcap was questioned and fired along with the rest of her colleagues, not for full-on treason, but for gross incompetence. Mrs. Marsden alone remained. Becket had gone underground, like many quick-thinking ops posted abroad. He resurfaced a few months later, was shaken down, and found clean.

The Chief held on because of his Whitehall connections, but he was deeply damaged by the scandal. Most of the Eastern European networks were completely razed. The American espionage partnership was nearly extinguished as well.

The Division’s internal structure had been completely exposed, and had to be redesigned and rebuilt from scratch. Victor was chosen for that job, and promoted to the office of the man who had betrayed and destroyed him. Hermann, too, had failed him in some way; his former mentor would no longer look at him. Hardware and crypto research were merged into one signals intelligence lab. Newt and Hermann, because of their success with the Blueberry, were appointed lead researchers: the specialists.

The next nine years passed. Lightcap got a miserable programming job at IBM’s London facility. Newt decided he did not like computers and shifted his focus to radio. Hermann stayed the same externally and changed dramatically inside. The Chief’s rebuilding strategy turned out to rest mostly on riding the Americans’ coattails. Victor appeared not to sleep. Newt invented the radio delay jammer and received a commendation for it. He and Hermann moved into flats on either side of the same block in Kenton. On one memorable occasion in 1971, Newt went on a consulting trip to Langley and then skipped the return flight to London. After two days of radio silence he phoned Hermann, drunk, from Coney Island, apologized profusely, and promised to be home soon. He returned to Britain a week later with a brand-new Bonneville and was formally reprimanded by upper management.

Lightcap and Newt had coffee every weekend, and soon started a rock band. Hermann bought an upright piano for his flat so that Newton would play it. Newt became secretly increasingly paranoid and began constructing his fortress of solitude. Hermann allowed himself to be convinced to watch _Star Trek_.

*   *   *

1973

Hermann woke in the early hours to the sound of someone pounding on his front door. It was pitch black in the apartment. He got up blearily and felt around for his cane in the dark, but he could not find it. The pounding continued. The buzzer sounded. Then again. Bent at the waist, drawn by the urgency of the sound, Hermann felt his way to his bedroom door and, leaning against the walls and doorways, made his way through the dark to his front door.

The hall was dim with diffuse streetlamp light. He was awake now. He knew the layout of his flat, he knew the number of paces between each of the eight doors and which way each one opened. When he reached the front door, which was still being beaten, he dragged the umbrella stand in front of the space where it would open. Then he said, “Just a moment,” loudly, and unbolted his door. He drew back the chain, turned the handle, and lurched backwards away from the door.

But no blow came. No attacker surged in and stumbled over the umbrella stand. The door drifted the rest of the way open, and revealed Newton—barely supporting himself on the wall, looking as nauseous and lost as a sailor about to be shipwrecked.

“Newton!” whispered Hermann in shock.

“Evening,” he managed, and then collapsed into Hermann’s unprepared arms.


	6. The Transmitter

**6\. The Transmitter**

HERMANN SET A HOT CUP of strong tea down on the table in front of Newt. Newt, half dozing with his head against the kitchen wall, came back to with a start.

“Newton,” said Hermann, for the fifteenth time in as many minutes. “Please let me take you to a hospital.”

“M’fine,” said Newt, blinking.

Hermann didn’t like that.

“Then please do not become unconscious at this table before explaining why.”

“I won’t,” said Newt, without any confidence. He set his sights on the teacup and reached for it.

Hermann watched him lift the cup, frowning. Newt raised it very slowly to his mouth, took a sip, winced, and set it carefully back down. He only spilled a little bit.

“Are you experiencing impaired fine motor functionality?” Hermann said with enough forced casualness to launch a national security inquiry.

“No. My motors are fine. It’s my balance that’s being weird.”

“If you—”

“Stop it with the hospital thing, would you?” said Newt, nudging Hermann’s knee with his.

Hermann muttered something in German and produced a tea towel seemingly from thin air. He wiped up the small amount of tea Newt had spilled. Newt tipped his head sideways against the cool white wall and closed his eyes, feeling both comforted and oppressed by his partner’s attentions.

“Turn on the radio,” Newt said, gesturing with eyes closed.

Socks slid over linoleum, and then the BBC’s early hours classical show began to play. Hermann turned it up to a volume incompatible with electronic eavesdropping.

“It started in February,” said Newt when Hermann had sat back down.

“In _February_? Newton, have you been ill—”

“No—I’m not sick! I’m telling you what happened, and it started in February, all right? Just listen. So in February. I got this file.”

“File?”

“Yes. Manila, with paper inside. You’re familiar?”

Newt cracked an eye open to get the full brunt of Hermann’s glare.

“It was misdirected,” he said, re-closing his eye. “It was lying on my desk when I came in, but it was not meant for me. Fifth-floor only. That was immediately clear from the labeling. Among other things, this file had a blueprint inside it. It was labeled ‘Transmitter’ and the credited author was ‘Greenwich.’ It looked like a bug. A radio transmitter. I gave it back to the delivery kid and told him to take it where it was supposed to go. But...”

“But you had already memorized it,” said Hermann. He reflected, not for the first time, what an asset Newton would be if recruited as a mole by the other side. He would not even need a microfilm camera to collect documents.

Newt explained that he had memorized both the blueprint and the first page of the file. The CO had been listed as Raleigh Becket. There had been a file reference number for Greenwich, and no other explanatory material.

The blueprint had been clearly labeled in every respect except for one: function.

“So, I gave the file back. But the more I thought about it, the more it bothered me,” Newt said. Here, a note of reproach crept into his voice. “I mean, I’m the head of Research and Tech Development—for engineering,” he added, before Hermann could interrupt to correct him. “I’m head of Radio RTD. I _am_ Radio RTD. So what the hell is this transmitter? Why wasn’t I involved in the project? Who the hell is Greenwich? Is he gunning for my job, or what?

“And the device itself—it was bizarre. Not only had I been uninvolved, but I couldn’t... _tell_ what this was. I couldn’t figure out how it worked or even what it was supposed to do.”

“That bothered you.”

“Immensely, my dear Watson,” said Newt. “So I started to rebuild it.”

“The diagram?”

“The transmitter.”

Hermann understood suddenly.

“That’s what you had hidden in your refrigerator,” he said. “Secret, stolen Division technology. Newton...”

“Hermann—please—before you say something about the unfathomable scale of my stupidity, just let me finish. See, I don’t think it _is_ Division technology.”

“Please explain,” said Hermann, picking up his tea and downing half of it, wishing it was something stronger.

Newt had spent the next few months rebuilding the device in the privacy of his home lab. But even when it was completed, it had answered no questions. When he'd turned it on, nothing happened. He'd had no idea what it transmitted, if it transmitted anything at all.

At a dead end with the device, he’d decided it was time to collect some internal intelligence. By this point, he explained, the conference was approaching. “Rumors about the big tech-trade-treaty with the CIA got me thinking: What if my transmitter is involved? So I made sure to get an invitation, and, then I, you know. Poked around.”

“How illegal of you.”

“Nobody gossips like spies gossip,” Newt said appreciatively.

By this point, it seemed Hermann’s anxiety had either eased or been forcibly contained.

Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 20 in D Minor drew busily to a close. There was a pause, and then the radio said, “You are tuned to BBC 1. The time at the tone will be 2 AM.”

They fell silent. The tone played. Hermann reflexively checked his wall clock. It was a couple seconds off.

Piano Concerto No. 27 in B Flat began.

“Ah, Mozart,” said Newt. “The Paul McCartney of the 18th Century.”

“I have no idea what you mean by that.”

“I respect him and all,” said Newt, rubbing his temples. “But when you really come down to it, it’s just soulless pop.”

Newt could almost hear Hermann’s eyes roll. He resumed his story.

He told Hermann about seeing Becket, and eavesdropping on the meeting next door with the American liaison. Hermann was not impressed.

“But I did learn a few things,” Newt said. “Important things. Rosewater said, ‘Wasn’t he your guy?’ And Becket said yes, he was Greenwich’s 'contact.'”

“Ah,” said Herman, finally understanding. “So Greenwich is...”

“The codename for a Soviet source.”

“And the transmitter is not Division technology.”

“No. It’s stolen Raz technology.”

“Passed to Raleigh Becket by someone who worked on the project.”

Newt nodded. He attempted another sip of tea. Hermann had so far vetoed his requests to move to the couch, on the grounds that Newt would nod off.

“Becket also mentioned Birch.”

“Bernard Birch?”

“I assume,” said Newt, grimly.

Birch had been a cipher clerk. He had defected the year before; his disappearance and subsequent return had been a minor public scandal. 

“Then they talked about the CIA tech,” Newt went on. “‘The Transducer.’”

“That’s what they called it?”

“Yeah.”

“That makes it sound...”

“Yeah,” said Newt. “Transducer and transmitter. It makes it sound like the two are related.”

Hermann frowned. “How? How is that possible, if this is the first exchange between the two agencies?”

“Convergent evolution?”

Hermann tapped his fingers on the table. “Not _impossible_ , I suppose, if it was us and the Americans. But the transmitter is Russian, and the transducer is American. Where is the convergence between the two of them?”

“There are plenty of projects they’re racing each other on,” Newt said, sitting forward and hugging one of his knees. “Picture this: In Langley, the DOD is working on some xyz—let’s say it’s nukes. A nuke thing. They know the Soviets are working on the same thing over in Moscow. They _want_ to know how far along the Soviets are, but their agents are coming up with nothing. Knock, knock—it’s the Brits on the transatlantic cable.” He put on an exaggerated accent: “‘Ello Yanks, we’ve got a _very_ valuable Soviet source sitting in our _parlour_ , and he’s saying he knows _all_ about the xyz project. But _we_ want something in exchange...’ Then they negotiate with us, and in exchange, the CIA agrees to show the Division the x of their yz.”

“It’s not impossible,” Hermann said again.

“But.”

“But...”

“But,” said Newt slowly, “It _sounds_ like they’re two complementary components. Like they go together.” He dropped his knee. “I know. It’s weird, right?”

Hermann nodded slowly.

It looked like something was still bothering him, so Newt asked again, but Hermann said it was nothing. Newt went on.

Saturday evening, he had called Hermann. Hermann had hidden (“—Presumably?” “Yes, it’s in my safe deposit box at the bank,” said Hermann) the telltale transmitter. Then Newt had purloined a meeting schedule and found a time when all three—Rosewater, Becket, and Victor—would be occupied. They had a meeting from 8:30 to 9:15 PM. He’d left the boarding house at 8:40, checked that the three were safely occupied, and gone in to the stables to look at the transducer.

Hermann did not like this part of the story.

“You did _what_ with it?”

Newt winced.

“And that’s...”

“And _that’s why you’re—_ ”

“Hermann!” hissed Newt. “Keep it _down!_ ”

“So,” he said several minutes later, when he had recovered his composure. “It’s still in your ear?”

Hermann was no longer hovering, the way he had when Newt had stumbled in. Instead he had removed himself as far from Newt as possible while still remaining in the kitchen. He was leaning against the furthest counter, arms folded, surveying him as if he were an unexploded mine. Newt anxiously wrapped his hands around his tea cup. It was hardly warm.

“Yes,” Newt said.

“And hence your—incapacitation?”

“Yes.”

“And your balance problems?”

“Yes.”

“And your—” Hermann sighed and looked at the ceiling in hopeless appeal to unseen deities. “Flight in the night from both the Division and the Central Intelligence Agency?”

Newt took a diplomatic sip of his tea.

After it had got stuck, he resumed, somebody else had come in.

“I can only assume to steal it,” Newt said.

“What a disappointment it must have been for them to find that you had beat them to it.”

“I didn’t _mean_ to steal it, Hermann,” Newt said, coloring. “Really. I just meant to look. I had to know.”

“You didn’t _have_ to, you _wanted_ to,” Hermann snapped. “You don’t think. You just act. It’s irresponsible. You are capable of rational thought, I _know_ you are. You simply—”

“Hermann, would you just listen for one more minute? I know, I know, I’m a trial and a disaster and a bore _,_ and isn’t it _generous_ of you to look after me, woe is you, but I’m almost done with my story, all right?”

Hermann glared at him in a way that said, Go ahead.

“Someone else came in. Through the back.”

Hermann stared.

“What time?” he asked.

“I checked my watch at 9:02,” said Newt. “He came in maybe, I don’t know, two minutes after that.”

Hermann nodded.

“I hid; he went up to the table. He said something quiet, I didn’t catch it. Then he smashed the glass case and left.”

“Out the back?”

“Yeah. Same way he came.”

“And you?”

“I waited a few minutes, then I followed.”

“Out the back way? No one saw you?”

“I don’t think so,” Newt said, “But I was, uh, a little disoriented.”

Hermann was rubbing his closed eyes. He looked exhausted.

“Then I caught a train home.”

“How?”

“I walked,” he said. “It’s only three miles,” he added when Hermann looked over. The anger had been shocked right off of his face, and replaced with something unbearably raw—pity, or just despair? Like a cloud had moved over the sun, Newt could suddenly see what Hermann was thinking with the total clarity of shadow—he could see himself in his partner’s mind’s eye, stumbling askew through the tall wet grass, skirting the light that fell from buildings, abandoning his beloved motorcycle and walking miles in the dark, disoriented and alone. The clarity with which he could read Hermann startled him, and then it was gone again.

*

“So, where do we stand?”

They were sitting in the living room, Hermann hunching slightly sideways in an armchair, Newt tucked against the arm of the couch with his feet up and his eyes closed. When they were open, the floor reeled unexpectedly.

The pronoun did not escape Newt’s notice.

“We?”

“You may be fired,” Hermann said, ignoring the question like it was beneath his notice. “But—much as I believe you have behaved badly—”

Newt rolled his eyes and suffered the vertiginous consequences.

“—and much as I hesitate to suggest this,” said Hermann, and then hesitated.

“What?”

“Well, it just seems like rather a lot of coincidences.”

Newt frowned.

“You receive a file ‘by accident.’ You are then conveniently invited to the relevant conference, where you are conveniently roomed next door to an important conversation between the relevant parties.”

“Mrs. Marsden told me she made the room arrangements.”

“What I’m saying is that the possibility should be considered.”

“What possibility?”

“The possibility that you are being set up in some way, Newton,” Hermann said. “If, for example, the person who snuck in to steal that device wanted to frame you for the theft—they would not have a difficult time of it.”

“But I did steal it.”

Hermann sighed sharply. “Yes, Newton, thank you, I had forgotten. Don’t you see that, if this was a plot, it was aptly executed?”

“Except one thing. They didn’t get it. I have it.”

“Well, yes,” said Hermann. “And that’s our second problem.”

“I would think it’s our advantage,” Newt said. “I mean, who knows what cool stuff it—”

“Our second problem,” Hermann said, talking over him, “is figuring out how to remove it without doing permanent damage, before _it_ does permanent damage.”

“I feel fine,” Newt said. He immediately stood up to demonstrate.

Hermann caught him before he tipped onto the carpet.

“Let me look at it,” Hermann said, sitting him back down on the couch.

The examination by pen light proved useless, and only agitated them both.

“If you will not go to a hospital—”

“Absolutely not.”

“—then I will find out what I can about this device.”

Newt looked at him quickly.

“If, however, your vertigo worsens,” Hermann said, taking out a handkerchief and wiping away the spot of blood from the small wound on Newt’s ear, “Or does not improve inside of a week, I will carry you to a doctor myself.”

“Deal,” said Newt immediately. Did he not expect any better offer, Hermann wondered, or was this absolute faith in Hermann’s ability to solve the problem?

“Good—” began Hermann, but Newton was already speaking:

“Or,” he said, “We could always run away. Disappear into the Pyrenees. They’d never find us, you know. They’d stop looking. We could cross the Atlantic and start a biker gang. Go riding through the prairies, purple mountains, from sea to shining sea.”

Hearing nothing, Newt opened his eyes again to find Hermann looking even angrier than before.

“Okay, okay, no road trip,” said Newt.

“That isn’t funny.”

Newt could see that Hermann was past the brink of exhaustion and losing his ability to regulate emotionally. Newt diplomatically effaced any reaction.

There was a pre-hysterical pause.

“What we need to do now,” Hermann finally said, carefully, “is find out where this device came from, what it does, and if the components are related. And if so, how.”

Two components. Two components, and Raleigh Becket. _That is not enough to be a connection,_ Hermann told himself. _Not enough._

But it could be.

“Tomorrow, I will go into the office. You will stay here.”

“Will you bring back the transmitter when you come home?”

“If I have the time,” said Hermann, with no intention of having the time. “At work, I will discover what I can. I will go to the registry and take out the Greenwich file.”

“Won’t that look suspicious?”

“I’ll handle it.”

“What if it’s classified?”

“I’ll _handle_ it.”

Newt cautiously raised his eyebrows.

“I will not handle it in an illegal manner,” Hermann said. “I will not break any rules or perform any subterfuge to find this information.”

 _Except for harboring a fugitive,_ Newt did not say.

That was a given.

Hermann seemed more upset than Newt could understand, but he chose to blame it on the lateness of the hour. He let Hermann lead him to bed, and collapsed instantly. But despite the hour, Hermann lay awake, imagining Abteilung searchlights stealing through the drawn curtains of his home. When he fell asleep, he dreamed of the Wall.

**END OF PART 1**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> * Note: The Abteilung, for the purposes of this story, is the GDR’s intelligence agency (affiliated with, but not technically run by, the USSR’s.) 
> 
> Transducer will go on a short break while I finish up writing Part 2, and then return with regular updates in August. Stay cool out there kids.


	7. Victor

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We're back! New chapters will be posted every other Friday until Part 2 is complete. (Depending on class schedule & job, there may or may not be another hiatus before Part 3.) Special thank-you to my editor Sasha for helping me to 1.) understand Newt better and 2.) not lose my damn mind.

** PART TWO **

“His experiences and hers became harder and harder to tell apart; everything gathered behind them into a common memory―though singly each of them might, must, exist, decide, act; all things done alone came to be no more than a simulacra of behavior: they waited to live again till they were together...”

― Elizabeth Bowen, _The Heat of the Day_

**7\. Victor**

Monday, June 4th  
London

WHEN HERMANN WOKE, he knew it had rained before he knew anything else. He became conscious of the fact first, and its cue second—it was the sound of wheels slicing through water on the street below.

The light from outside was bright gray, the implacable London shade that obfuscates the time. It could have been morning, early evening, high noon. But it was 7:00. He’d hardly managed four hours of sleep. The bed next to him was empty, but there was a small spot of blood on the pillow, extinguishing his last hope that it had all been a dream.

For another moment he laid there, half sitting up. He felt completely unequal to the task of rising. There was too much before him, and too much behind. He could never surmount it all. From the other room, he heard morning kitchen sounds—the click-clack of the coffee machine, the springs of the toaster, the murmur of the wireless. Newton was humming to himself (Take a Walk on the Wild Side).

Hermann got up.

After forbidding Newton from leaving the apartment or destroying it from within, he left for work alone. The train was crowded. On the gray Century steps, wind chased scraps of newspaper across the stone. It felt nothing like June—it felt like September. A church bell chimed the half hour, then eight chimes. A second bell joined in on the fourth note and chimed its own time, delayed. 

*

Hermann’s plan was simple; so simple it was not even a plan, not really. He would execute a normal work day (easy), dodge any questions about Newton (unlikely), then slip into the registry (under a pretense) and ferret out the file whose number Newton had recited for Hermann three times (until Hermann could repeat it back). The Greenwich file.

At 8:40 AM he entered the lab apprehensively, peering around the corner for his labmate—but Wesley’s desk was empty. No sooner had Hermann hung up his jacket than he heard a voice call from next door:

“All right, Dr. Gottlieb?”

A head was poking out of the office attached to their lab.

“Gottlieb—is that you? Yes—I thought so. All right? Nice weekend? Restful? Awful weather, isn’t it?”

“Rather,” said Hermann perfunctorily. “It hardly seems like June.”

“Hardly,” agreed Hal Weeks. “Though I did hear this morning that it’s supposed to let up tomorrow. Should be gorgeous. Would you come in here, please? Is that the _Times_? May I—?”

Hermann approached his boss’s office apprehensively. He held out his paper for him.

“Thank you,” said Weeks, taking it, refolding it. “Didn’t have time to read mine this morning. Got an early call. Do come in.”

Hermann walked in through the door that Weeks, still fussing with the paper, held for him, and found himself the victim of an ambush. A slender neck twisted and dark eyes locked on to him from behind rimless specs.

“Good morning, Dr. Gottlieb,” said Victor.

Hermann’s first impulse—to snatch his paper back from Weeks and swat him with it—was lost in Victor’s headlights. It must have been the first time Victor had looked him in the eye in years, because Hermann felt like he had fallen into a subway tunnel and a light was rushing towards him.

*

Hal Weeks was an unassuming man, tall but tippy. He had a tuft of sandy-red hair, retreating on his scalp from all sides, and he dressed rather well. He liked Hermann, which was odd, because Hermann did not like him. And he had never disliked him more than he did this morning.

Weeks sat behind his desk, so tall he seemed to be hovering behind it. He worried the corner of the closed file on this desk. Hermann sat on the other side, next to Victor but at an awkward angle. Victor was smoking. Hermann declined his offer of a cigarette. He felt like he and Victor were an extremely tense tennis double.

“Well,” the Vice Chief said, in a friendly tone, slightly hoarse. “Thank you for coming in.”

Victor had a curious way of appearing to belong in every room, as if he had furnished the place himself and invited you in as his guest. He had dark hair, and bright, heavy-lidded eyes. His jaw was crooked, which gave him an approachable asymmetry and a permanent, slight grimace. Legend had it that he’d gotten his jaw broken in a fight during his residency in Istanbul after the war, when the trio established itself as a force: Bowen and Victor running the Turkish networks, with point-man Rennie twisting arms for them. The jaw surgery had been haphazard; it had never realigned properly.

Victor’s father had been the youngest son of a duke, an heir to wealth but no title. When Hermann had met him nearly twenty years before, at the beginning of his career, Victor had had a full, open face and small, thick-framed glasses. All that had drained away now—he had hollowed cheeks and frameless specs. The change was extraordinary; it was like accelerated decay. He had long since abandoned the eccentric, flamboyant style of dress that Bowen had made fashionable in the service. He dressed in dark, old-fashioned suits. With his high white collar, he looked like an undertaker.

“Of course, sir,” said Hermann stiffly.

“Awfully good of you,” offered Weeks.

“I do work here,” said Hermann.

With the graceful aristocratic condescension of eras gone by, Victor ignored their exchange. “I’ve come to check on our friend Orpheus, Dr. Gottlieb,” he said, leaning forward to pocket his cigarette case. “What progress have you made?”

That was obviously not the reason, or he would have just sent Preston Blair. Hermann nervously hesitated trying to think of a polite synonym for “none whatever.”

Weeks rushed into the vacuum of his unfortunate pause: “I don’t suppose Hermann had much time to run the numbers on Friday. And he didn’t come in this weekend. Did you?”

“No. I didn’t.”

“No progress, then?” said Victor, still perfectly friendly.

“None, sir,” said Hermann. “Sorry. None yet.”

“Of course, Dr. Gottlieb,” said Victor, crossing his legs.

On top of the alien friendliness, the honorific irritated Hermann. His irritation was sharpened by the memories, unexpectedly vivid today, from a decade before—all the times in Victor’s office or in his club when he had proudly introduced Hermann to important people, all on the frank, first-name basis he had with everyone—and Hermann hadn’t even minded. He remembered the first time they met, how, when Victor crossed his legs and leaned forward to finally make the offer, his trouser cuffs had tugged up to reveal irreverent orange socks. How Hermann had adored Victor from that day on. He’d admired his wisdom, his easy way with people, and even that silly umbrella he’d always carried, back then.

“But it’ll be top priority this week,” Weeks was saying, talking anxiously into the silence. Hermann studied the buttonhole on Victor’s lapel. “Not to worry, sir. We’ll have something for you before you know it.”

“I know you will,” said Victor. “The gears never stop down here. I do admire that about your department,” he said, and it was unclear whom he was addressing. “But the same is true of our enemies, as you well know. And in fact, while you were both enjoying your weekends, Signals intercepted a new batch of Orpheus transmissions.”

“Oh,” said Hermann dumbly.

“And could you guess from where, Dr. Gottlieb?”

Hermann did not need to feign the expected wonderment and confusion: “No, sir, where?”

Victor tapped his cigarette on the rim of Weeks’s ashtray and said, “A little ways east of Norfolk, East Anglia.” His voice flicked up in an arc like a hound flipping a rabbit onto its back. That was the risk in harnessing your actual confusion to mask what you knew and did not: it could expose your actual throat. Hermann had forgotten that.

“Near the Estate, sir?”

“Oh, my, well,” said Weeks, starting some sentence and then dropping it.

“Exactly. As you know, Dr. Gottlieb, we are in the middle of an important ten-day conference with the Americans. You probably know it is being hosted at the old training estate. I know these things get around.”

Victor tipped his chin back slightly, taking a pull from his cigarette, and looked over the framed pictures on Weeks’s wall—naval prints from the golden age of sea trade. Hermann wrestled his instinct to sit perfectly still and make himself as small as possible.

“The Americans are overtaking us,” Victor said mildly. “When I got started, before the war, they were our little protégés. But the scales tipped, when it was all over. Or perhaps sometime shortly after. They’ve simply got more money, and more manpower. We’ve lost face over the years. Everyone knows it.”

Hermann was frowning, hiding his mounting fear. Was Victor about to talk about Bowen?

But he was not: “I don’t believe the Chief has any hope of recovering our prestige. Nor does Whitehall, most likely. They’re perfectly happy with his solution, which, it seems, is to simply ride the Americans’ slipstream wherever they’ll let us fly.”

His cigarette was dwindling. The one crack in the veneer was the way he pronounced the word— _Americans—_ there was a violent disdain in the second syllable. Without that, Hermann might have trusted this apparent display of frankness.

“It’s an ugly war, this,” Victor went on, still addressing the prints. He massaged his jaw slowly. “And these imperfect alliances are a necessary sacrifice. Still—there’s a lot the Americans don’t understand, I think.” His eyes, darkly pensive, flicked to Hermann’s. “They fight from hatred. They hate the reds. They fear them. They’ve got a sort of directionless hunger. They haven't got loyalty to a _cause_. You see? They don’t do it for queen and country. They do it for themselves.”

Hermann frowned, evincing skepticism.

“But,” said Victor, exhaling some smoke, “Misery, strange bedfellows, and all that. There were suggestions of interference at the conference beforehand, which I rather recklessly ignored—” (There were the first outright lies Hermann had detected, for he knew Victor had dreamed up all those suspicions himself, and that the chances of his doing nothing were close to zero)— “and now it seems we are going to pay the price.”

“Interference, sir?” said Hermann, taking the first step out onto the tightrope.

“When was the last time you saw Dr. Geiszler, Dr. Gottlieb?” said Hal Weeks, surprising him from the right.

Hermann turned.

“Dr. Geiszler?”

“Yes.”

Hermann paused the length of a breath for thought. “Thursday morning, in the office, I believe. Probably the same time you last saw him. Sir.” Hermann forced himself to turn back to Victor, so as not to be seen averting his eye. “He told me he was going to the conference.”

“He was,” said Victor. “He’s missing.”

Hermann raised his eyebrows.

“Missing, sir?”

“Yes. He disappeared from the Estate last night.”

Hermann’s lungs contracted quick and tight. He was not a good liar, not outright. But he had not learned nothing from his training, in which Victor had played no small part. The trick was not to lie; it was to believe in your role as completely as you believed in whatever pair of shoes you were wearing that day.

“What happened?”

“He simply vanished, it seems,” said Victor, with a cheerfully upturned inflection that betrayed extreme English anger. He looked at Weeks for the first time in the whole meeting. “He was last seen at dinner, last night. All of his things were left in his room, and his... motorbike is also still in the garage. I’m letting you in on these details, Dr. Gottlieb, because it’s very important that we find him. If he contacts you. Has he?”

“No, sir,” said Hermann.

“I know you two are friends,” Victor said, somewhat carelessly, eyes elsewhere. “Despite it all. You can imagine how this will look to the Americans, if it gets out. He’s misbehaved in front of them before. They weren’t happy then either.”

This allusion to Newton’s East Coast crisis two years earlier was unexpected, and agitated Hermann.

“I’m sure it’s... much the same, this time,” he managed.

“You know about that, then?” Victor said mildly.

Hermann and Weeks exchanged an unusually frank look. “Yes, sir, it was... difficult,” he said. He cursed the man mentally—for his inexplicable, weeklong radio silence and his undignified return with his undignified motorcycle.

The incident would have been easier to explain if Hermann actually understood it.

“My colleague is quite... He has a rather unusual mind,” said Hermann. “This is not news to anyone. His sense of proportion is perfectly balanced in analytical matters. In emotional matters, it is... not.”

Hermann glared at the corner of Weeks’s desk for a moment. He was collecting himself. He was careful not to offer a concrete explanation. When he met Victor’s eyes, he did so wearing a rendition of the frustration he genuinely felt.

Victor nodded slightly.

“He seems difficult to work with,” Victor said, and Hermann knew he’d had him.

Hal Weeks exhaled a laugh of agreement. “You could say that, sir,” Weeks said.

Hermann only nodded. Victor’s face loosened into something brighter, an allusion to a sympathetic smile. Hermann began to relax.

“It’s just that Dr. Geiszler is not the only thing missing from the Estate, you see,” said Victor, suddenly sitting forward and snubbing his cigarette out on Weeks’s ashtray in a single movement. “Several documents and an extremely valuable piece of equipment have also gone missing, Dr. Gottlieb.”

An irrational rage shot through Hermann— _Dr. Gottlieb, Dr. Gottlieb_ —and for a moment he hated Victor for tacking that honorific on like the butt of the gun he had just pistol-whipped him with. He wished with stupid longing to be home lying on his carpet, listening to Newton play the piano, and with an almost equal longing to be back in time, fifteen years younger, sitting across from Victor at his club. He wished for those days—the days of being Victor’s protégé and confidant—when Victor had lit his way up the stairs at the Division, and confided in him about his family life, his difficult divorce. Hermann even knew his surname, knew it still. Hermann remembered it all, and he remembered the end—the terrible December day in the soundproof conference room off the Chief’s office, and the look on Victor’s face when Hermann had told him that Charles Rennie was dead.

“Oh dear,” he managed. “What’s missing?”

“Documents,” said Victor, disconcertingly not lighting another cigarette. He leaned back with his arms folded, as if daring Hermann to interpret him as relaxed. “Some equipment the CIA brought in to show to us, and the documents we are presenting in exchange. It’s all gone.”

“What sort of equipment, sir?” Hermann said.

“I’m afraid I can’t say,” said Victor with a slight sneer.

“Do the Americans know?”

“Not yet,” said Victor. “But they will by the end of the week. That’s when the higher-ups arrive. Once they arrive to negotiate terms of the exchange, I’m afraid it will be impossible to hide the truth—that the goods on exchange have all vanished.”

Hermann’s mind was racing. So the blueprints were missing too. _The second man did take them._

“And you suspect Dr. Geiszler has made off with these… with all this?” he said.

“As soon as we realized the equipment was missing, we alerted our people and made inquiries. The Americans had a sign-in sheet in the building where they were keeping the equipment. The last name on it was someone called ‘Neilson Garrett.’ We made an emergency search of the campus last night. Turned up nothing. The only person unaccounted for was Dr. Geiszler. Though, as I mentioned, all of his possessions were still in his room.”

Hermann watched Victor light another cigarette. He deposited the match in the ashtray.

“Oh, pardon me, two people were unaccounted for.”

Hermann prayed silently that the second was Becket.

“Mr. _Garrett_ was also nowhere to be found.” Victor exhaled some smoke. “His name was also missing from our conference rosters.”

Hermann nodded slowly. “I see.”

“I’m telling you all this, Dr. Gottlieb, so you can help.” Victor looked him in the eye. “If you have any information, this is the time to share it.”

Hermann shook his head. “I’m sorry, sir.”

“Or if you hear anything,” said Victor. “From Geiszler, or from other sources. You haven’t heard from Geiszler?”

“No, sir,” said Hermann, again.

“If you do,” said Victor, “tell him to come directly to us. Maybe he saw something and ran. Maybe he’s having troubles of his own, completely unrelated. I want any undue suspicion cleared up as soon as possible. We’ve got to focus our attention on the right person.”

Victor stood up suddenly. Weeks jumped to his feet, and Hermann rose more slowly, reaching for his cane.

“Needless to say—no mention of this outside this office. Geiszler’s on vacation again, if anyone asks. And Orpheus is top priority. The sheet, please, Weeks?”

“Sir, of course,” said Weeks, as Victor snubbed out his barely-smoked cigarette in Weeks’s tray and held out his hand. He handed Victor the file on his desk, and Hermann watched it pass, cursing himself for not looking it over when he had the chance. It was unlabeled, and very thin.

“Thank you,” Victor said. “Dr. Gottlieb.”

“Sir.”

Victor left.

*

“Gottlieb, a moment?” said Weeks, before Hermann could follow.

He sat back down with silent relief. There was an agreed-upon pause until they heard the sound of the lab’s outer door closing.

“Sir, how exactly are we concealing the theft from the Americans?”

Hermann did not feel he had to play his hand as closely with Weeks, because he did not consider him very astute. In fact, he considered him quite foolish.

Leaning back, Weeks replied, “I don’t know for certain. If they had been the ones to find it missing, then we’d have been in trouble.”

“Who was it?” Hermann asked.

“Victor, actually. That’s why he actually came down here in _person_.” Weeks leaned back even further, a seemingly impossible angle without tipping. “I think that’s why Vic’s been able to keep it under wraps. He personally searched the place, requisitioned the Americans’ sign-in sheet, and took the first train back this morning. He was in my office when I came in. Rather a shock, actually. Wanted me to take a look at the sign-in sheet and see if I recognized the handwriting.”

“Which handwriting?”

“This Garrett fellow,” said Weeks with a combination of mystification and resignation. He took out his anachronistic pipe and sat abruptly forward. He tapped it on the edge of his desk.

Hermann was full of dread. “And did you?”

“Afraid not,” said Weeks, opening a drawer and searching inside. “I even showed him some of Geiszler’s handwritten reports, for a comparison. It didn’t match. Not that that means much.”

“That was the file you had, then?” Hermann dared to ask.

Weeks nodded, taking his bag of tobacco out. He told Hermann Victor’s timetable as he packed his pipe.

Victor, Becket, and the American liaison had been in a meeting until 9:15 PM. After the meeting, Victor had gone to the barn where the “equipment” was being stored.

Victor had signed in with the American guards. The last name on the sheet was Neilson Garrett. Never having heard of this person, Victor asked the guards who he was. They described a short, dark-haired CIA agent. (No glasses.) Garrett had said he’d just arrived, and wanted to check up on his equipment.

Garrett had signed in at 8:45, out never, Weeks reported from his look at the sheet that morning. Above Garrett on the sheet was Raleigh Becket: in at 8:20, out at 8:31. Below him was Victor, in at 9:20 and out at 9:26. Victor went into the room, he said, and found it empty.

In his head, Hermann was tabulating the story against the one Newt had told him last night. It all matched up, but he felt no relief.

“That was all he said about Dr. Geiszler?” Hermann asked. “There was nothing else to implicate him, aside from his absence?”

Weeks was trying and failing to light his pipe. He shook his head.

“Nothing else, nothing else. Vic said he last saw him at dinner, ‘round 7:30. After that, nothing.”

He cast the burnt-out match onto the table and lit another.

“Gottlieb, I have no doubt this is just—bad timing,” he said, pipe between his teeth. “Geiszler will be all right. He’ll come back.”

“I’m sure, sir,” said Hermann stiffly. He watched Weeks fail with the second match as well.

“Have you really not heard from him?” Weeks said, looking up. He shook the extinguished match. “You can tell me the truth, Dr. Gottlieb. I won’t tell Vic. I want Geiszler to turn himself in, too.”

Hermann, a little lightheaded from the adrenaline comedown, felt a sharp disgust at this heavy-handed invitation by Weeks into his confidence. He wasn’t certain how much Weeks really knew about their relationship, but in that moment he resolved he would tell him nothing. Nothing, ever.

Weeks dropped his eyes back to his matches, apparently unwilling to pursue the point. “Until Geiszler comes back,” he said, “just focus on Orpheus. Cross-reference away. Don’t worry about this conference, don’t worry about Geiszler. He’ll show up—I’m certain of it.”

The third match was the charm. He clamped the pipe between his teeth, puffing triumphantly, and swept the matches into his palm. He reached far across his desk to deposit them in his glass ashtray, which Victor had left on the distant edge. Unaccountably, Hermann remembered the first time he had met Robert Bowen, sometime in the 50s. He too had smoked a pipe. He had also carried an umbrella, just like Victor. With a sudden deflating pity, Hermann had recognized the reason Victor carried one. He’d even dressed like him.

With a final nod and thanks, Hermann left Weeks’s office.

When Hermann opened the door, he started—someone was outside. But it was just Wesley. He was trudging by with his three-bag mug of tea, heading towards his desk.

“Dr. Wesley,” said Hermann. “You startled me.”

“Hermann,” Gus Wesley said, smiling hello with uneven teeth. “Newt in yet?”

“Not yet,” said Hermann. “I don’t believe he’s coming in today.”

Wesley nodded, eyes darting to Weeks’s shut door. “Shame,” he said, in his uncomfortably loud voice. “Some June this is, eh?”

“Indeed.”

“I like it cold, myself,” Wesley said. “Everybody hates the long winter, but I like it.”

Hermann had no response to offer, and no interest in prolonging the interaction. There was a pause while Wesley looked at him.

“I hear it’s meant to break,” he finally said.

“So everyone keeps telling me,” said Hermann.


	8. Greenwich

**8\. Greenwich**

WHILE HERMANN WAS WORKING in the lab under a stormcloud of institutional anxiety, Newt was at home on Airedale Street, struggling against an enemy of similar magnitude: boredom.

Really, he _was_ a self-motivated person, he reflected as he sat on the kitchen floor among the pieces of Hermann’s disassembled toaster and clock radio—and thank God for that. Even in the face of quarantine-lockdown in a house with no television, no interesting books, and no records with words in English, and _even_ in the face of intermittent vertigo of unknown etiology from a device of unknown purpose in his ear canal of unknown destiny—even here, now, he was resourceful.

Hermann was upset with him. Newt didn’t blame him, though he didn’t regret what he’d done. He thought he’d been a bit reckless by showing his face to the guards instead of sneaking in, but in all, he felt his actions from February to today to be justified.

Newt hummed When I’m Gone, an old folk song Caitlin liked, quietly to himself as he liberated the AM antenna from the radio’s circuit board. What Hermann didn’t understand was his motive. Perhaps Newt himself didn’t either, but he had the mental privilege of never (or, rarely) questioning his own motives. If he wanted to do something, the desire originated in his brain, and he knew of no worthier qualification. The effects of these desires or actions on others came second. Yet despite these standard rationalizations, he was beginning to suffer from a creeping doubt still too nascent to classify.

So far today, instead of repenting, he had: cleaned up breakfast, searched futilely for the cat, fixed Hermann’s clock according to his watch, attempted to use the vacuum cleaner, deemed it inefficient and taken it apart to improve it, gotten bored, turned on the BBC newscast and discovered that the clock had actually been _right_ , rewound both his watch and the clock, and practiced piano until he got a headache. He had also done some tests on the transducer’s ongoing effects.

But he was bored. Newt was under strict house arrest orders, but he wanted someone to talk to. He thought about going downstairs to check on his budgies, who were in the care of Hermann’s 12-year-old neighbor, Jake. Jake was a good kid. He was the youngest of a large black Pentecostal family that lived on the first floor. Jake took good care of the birds whenever Newt was gone, and kept an eye on the apartment from across the courtyard too. But it was Monday—he was probably at school.

He wandered out onto the balcony, where it was raining halfheartedly, and gazed longingly at his own distant apartment across the courtyard. “Won't see the golden of the sun when I'm gone,” he sang quietly, holding the slick railing for support, “And the evenings and the mornings will be one when I'm gone...” It wasn’t loneliness, exactly, or restlessness; it was the feeling that the world was going on outside without him. He, of all people, knew how fast and ferocious time moved.

From experience, he knew the argument wasn’t over. This budding sense of guilt was going to make him defensive, and then things would get contentious. Unfortunate, Newt reflected, glaring at the circuit board, that he was not after all just a brain in a box. He could argue solipsism with Hermann as many times as he liked, deflect his Wittgenstein-isms with Descartes, but alas, evidence continued to accumulate that he was not alone in the universe, and that there were others nearby whom his actions did affect.

Newt went back inside, wiping off his glasses. He wanted to call Lightcap, but stopped short of the phone. He was wary of the line, and she was at work anyway.

Lightcap worked as a programmer now, but her area of expertise was everything. Any system—information, electronics, music theory—she would map and master with the energy of a child chess prodigy. Her trouble lay where her mind ended and others’ began. Lightcap was blonde, pretty, and very tall, with a deep, disconcerting voice. That voice, her unbecoming haircut, and her intimidating height were the speedbumps that threw eager men off. And in her chosen field, at the Division, there had been many such men. She had never been well-accepted there, but she had not accepted this non-acceptance. Instead, she’d stalked from department to department, solving complex problems and creating enemies of the men she disturbed.

Newt was one of the only exceptions. He’d met her back when she worked at the Black Chamber, early in Newt’s Hardware career. It had been an auspicious first meeting.

“Knock knock,” Newt had said, opening the door without knocking. He heard a wordless shriek and a metal _thunk_ dangerously close to his head.

He looked down, then up.

“Did you just throw a stapler at me?”

There was a woman sitting behind a desk at the far end of the room.

“Oh. You’re not who I thought you were,” she said.

“Um.”

She stared at him with a surprisingly unrepentant blankness. She had thrown it quite a distance and quite level, for such a heavy object. If he had, in that moment, chosen to compliment her arm, they would never have become friends. But instead, he said, “Hi. I’m new. I wasn’t told there would be ballistics.”

“No one warned you about the Chamber Guard?”

“No, no, not a word. They just said, ‘Bungle down and grab me those files, young feller.’ Nothing about needing a helmet.”

“I thought you were Prick Warren,” she said.

“Isn’t his name Patrick?”

“Is that not what I said?”

“Oh yes. It is. I just wanted to be sure that I heard right. I’m new. As I mentioned.”

“I heard you,” said the woman, folding her hands together, “when you mentioned it.”

“A fellow American?” he said, in reference to her accent.

“Just an accomplished mimic.”

She was actually, as he later learned, the bidialectal child of a vicious British Army officer, raised on various American bases.

“Impressive,” said Newt, taking a step into the office. “Well, pleased to meet you. No hard feelings about the flying staplers, by the way. I should have knocked. Or ducked.”

“You didn’t need to,” the woman said with an unkind inflection.

Newt shrugged.

“May I?” he said.

She could see that her height joke had stymied him by how it severed any rejoinder. Feeling a stab of remorse, she jerked her head. “Come in.”

She stood as he approached. He registered no visible reaction to her height and shook her hand, saying, “Newt Geiszler, Hardware,” and she said “Caitlin Lightcap. Research.”

“What are you doing down here, if you’re Research?”

“They move me around a lot,” she said.

“Jack of all trades?”

“‘Difficult to work with,’ actually.”

“I see, I see,” said Newt, grinning.

“Is that funny?”

“It’s all too familiar,” Newt said, too busy laughing at himself to notice her aggression.

He explained what records he needed from the Black Chamber, and the Chamber Guard graciously helped him find them. The Black Chamber was the classified archive, for old files out of circulation. It dated back to the earliest days of British government surveillance, when the crown paid to have foreign envelopes steamed open. And it lived up to its name: the room she led him into was a pitch-black basement. A switch turned on dim, ancient lightbulbs.

“Golly gee,” he said. “Are these Edison originals?”

Newt sneezed from the dust.

“You tell me, Buddy Holly,” she said. “I thought you were the engineer.”

“I’m the engineer, not the electrician,” he said. “But I could probably requisition some more up-to-date bulbs for you. ‘Lightbulbs for Lightcap,’ I’d call it. It would be a covert operation. Because by ‘requisition,’ I did mean ‘steal.’”

“Not the most covert name for your op,” she pointed out.

“Hey, I’m the electrician, not the spymaster.”

“You’re kind of adorable, Geiszler.”

“Please, don’t patronize me.”

They were friends from that day on. They’d worked together at the Estate for a while, until her firing in ‘63. For the past ten years, she had worked at IBM’s London facility as a programmer. She hated it.

Since her firing, Newt had made efforts, probably against protocol, to keep connected. Sometimes he felt he was her only lifeline, but that made him fret, because he was not much of a lifeline. Sometimes he wondered why she stayed here in England, but he knew she hated her family, and would rent a room in hell if they were in heaven. Sometimes he romanticized their heady, semi-alcoholic days together at the Estate, but these days, by the end of a night of drinking with her, he was relieved to go home to Hermann’s quiet flat.

Still, he loved her, and wished he could talk to her. He looked away from the phone. They had a gig on Wednesday. If all went well, he’d see her then, and tell her everything. He turned, swaying a little, went back to the kitchen, and resumed trying to install radio controls into Hermann’s toaster.

*

Century Central File Registry was open daily until 6 PM. Most of Century’s daytime employees went home at 5, so when Hermann entered the registry at 4:50 PM, most registry visitors were leaving or already gone. Century Central was the internal file library: all general access files were available here. Smaller, more specialized file libraries existed for particular sections, with ‘reading rooms’ requiring special clearance. Hermann’s only clearance was for the crypto library. He had checked their registry index during lunch, while their clerk Aalvar took a nap at his desk, but as he’d expected, they had no file named Greenwich.

The registry took up the entire third floor of Century. White concrete pillars braced a tile floor and a tile ceiling. The reading area had dignified university library wooden tables, complete with green-hooded lamps, but the stacks were a maze of dull metal shelves and file cabinets. The distant walls were lined with tall glass block windows, distorting the light passing in and out. As usual, after a day in the sealed basement lab, Hermann was disoriented by the natural light.

He approached the desk, behind which loomed the vast card catalog. The clerk on duty was Sykes. He had been a cipher clerk in the field, once, but like many cipher clerks, the stress had gotten to him. He was happier here, viciously cross-checking and guarding his files. Hermann had hoped Sykes would not be on duty, for he was by far the most uptight clerk.

“Afternoon, Sykes.”

Sykes looked up. “A bit late to sign in, isn’t it, Gottlieb?”

“Registry hours have changed, have they?” said Hermann. “Pardon me. I must have missed the memo.”

This retort amused Sykes for some reason. “I don’t know that they circulate to the basement,” he said, picking up the chained clipboard from his desk and handing it to Hermann. He searched for a pen. “Request tickets are there. Be quick about it, would you? I want to get home for the match.”

“Shouldn’t be long,” said Hermann, signing in, but when he handed Sykes five tickets, the clerk was not impressed.

He turned to the card catalog behind his desk and opened five tiny drawers. He copied the file numbers onto the tickets and tore off carbon copies while giving Hermann the spiel: “Take them out yourself but don’t put them back. Stay in this area to read them, keep everything on the table at all times; no ink, notes in ballpoint only, absolutely no writing on the files. Mack will be gone, so just bring your files up to me, with tickets, when you’re finished. No skulking around the aisles. And I’ll need your bag.” He gave Hermann his file tickets and took his bag.

The last few stragglers were getting up from the reading tables. A young assistant clerk with a deer-in-the-headlights look, who could only be Mack, was collecting abandoned files and tickets in a cart. He hurried over to demand where Hermann thought he was going, but when Hermann showed him his tickets, Mack docilely showed him where to go.

The stacks were deserted. Hermann was acutely aware of the sound of his cane on the tile. He collected the first four files, which were a range of colors and sizes and came from different sections. Most were projects he had personally worked on, either completed or scrapped, of no importance. Finally, he made his way to the section that contained the Greenwich file.

He closed his eyes and collected himself. The section ID, shelf code, and file number flashed by, recited by Newton and stored by Hermann in his color-coded memory. He opened his eyes and found the shelf. He could hear the squeaky wheel of Mack’s cart, a few rows over. He took a deep breath, then knelt down before the shelf. There was Greenwich: a blue file, thin. He took the blue file in his arms (Atlas, a 1968 radio surveillance op on the Turkish embassy, scrapped), opened it, and removed its contents. He slid Greenwich off the shelf, removed its contents, and swapped them. He put the Greenwich file back, Atlas contents inside. Then he stood up and made his way back to a desk. He sat as far from Sykes as he could, and began to read.

*

In March, 1972, Passport Officer at the British Embassy in Vienna Raleigh Becket (unofficially, the Head of the Austrian Station for the Division) received an offer from a defector. The man was a Razvedka scientist. He was working on a very important, very secret project in East Germany, and that was all he would say. His codename was Greenwich.

So said Becket’s first report, submitted to London last March. London’s first reply, a day later, requested more information. This offer was irregular in many ways. Foremost: why was it coming to Becket, in Vienna, and not to Fischer, the East Berlin Head of Station?

We need more information, Becket told Greenwich. Meanwhile, he contacted Fischer in East Berlin. Fischer told him they had rejected Greenwich already, not believing him to be genuine. They thought he was only looking for money.

When Greenwich answered Becket, he told a different story. He said that the project in (location redacted) had placed him in danger. Once it was completed, he feared he would be recalled to Moscow and silenced—imprisoned, or worse. But further, the project itself was hounding his conscience. He believed the device was dangerous, and wished he had never helped to build it.

Becket wrote this up in his second report to London. He was already starting to buy into it, Hermann could tell. He couldn’t see why. But then, he didn’t have the interpersonal instincts of a case officer.

Here Becket accepted Greenwich’s first offering: his real name. He sent this to London in his second report. (The name was redacted in the file.) They looked it up, and found him in Century. Greenwich was educated at (redacted), graduated with a degree in (redacted) in the year (redacted). He had worked on the (redacted) RTD project during WWII for the Red Army.

His personnel file reference number was included, but it had been crossed out, and a new number had been stamped in red beside it. Hermann recognized the formatting: the original file would have been accessible to him, but the new file was not. Sometime between last year and today, Greenwich’s clearance had been raised.

Now Becket gambled where the East German resident had not. He sent his third report to London: he wanted to negotiate terms with Greenwich. With clearance, he would issue a visa under a fake name. He requested permission, and a passport.

What convinced him?

London replied a few days later. They did not approve the immediate request for resettlement. They would authorize an info-first trade. If Greenwich shared his information, and they could verify it, then they would issue a visa.

While Becket was arguing with London, Greenwich sent him another plea. The testing stages of the project were almost complete. He was personally holding back on the final stages of development, he said, but he could only drag his feet for so long.

He reached out, he said, not for his own self-preservation, but for the damage he feared this device could cause. Please, he begged Becket personally. Please make me a deal.

Becket, reporting this in his fourth missive, expressed doubt about Greenwich’s sincerity. The cipher clerk, encrypting this report, made an addendum to assert his belief.

Hermann frowned at this. Becket’s coding clerk had inserted his opinion into a report? That was bizarre and against protocol.

Indeed, the reply dispatch from London agreed. They issued a warning, and a threat of formal reprimand, to cipher clerk “B.B.”

“Riveting stuff?”

Hermann jumped and shut the file. Sykes was right behind him. Apparently he was not actually reading over Hermann’s shoulder, because he just chuckled and said, “30 minutes til closing time. Last call.”

“Thank you,” Hermann replied curtly.

Sykes left and he resumed reading.

A week later, Greenwich sent Becket an ultimatum. His last day of work on the base had been set. He was being sent home to Moscow.

He said he would destroy all his files and prototypes on his final day in the airbase. He knew that this was a suicide mission. But the project had to be destroyed. It would die with him, he said, unless Becket sent someone. He would tell all he knew. He had no price.

Hermann found that his heart was beating somewhere in his stomach. _No_ price? He glanced at the clock behind Sykes’s desk. It was 5:36.

One sentence of Greenwich’s message was blacked out. Perhaps this contained the convincing detail; or perhaps the desperation compelled him. Whatever the reason, this message sold Becket. He did not send anybody. He went to Greenwich himself.

Hermann could picture it: Becket taking his jacket off the back of his desk chair and walking right out of the Vienna embassy, into a cab, and onto an airplane. He submitted no travel request to London, and no warning to the East Berlin residents. As the former East Berlin resident himself, he knew the territory.

In the city, he got in touch with Greenwich somehow. There were no details on how. The next pages in the file were a transcription of their conversation, from a tape made on Becket’s pocket recorder in a safehouse flat over the long night of May 15th, 1972.

The transcript was many pages long, highly redacted. The curious reader was referred again to Greenwich’s classified personnel file. Hermann glanced at the clock again. He had not given himself enough time. He started scanning the transcript quickly.

Greenwich was a Russian military intelligence scientist. He worked in radio surveillance RTD—the elder Newton Geiszler of the Razvedka. He summarized his career, giving the highlights. In 1971, he had been sent to the G.D.R. for a special project.

The thump of his glass on the coffee table was noted. Stolichnaya, Hermann wondered? Or had Becket scrounged up some German liquor?

Becket began to ask ordered questions about the project, but Greenwich was unwilling to give up the monologue. He interrupted Becket, finally, and said he wished to clarify his reasons for doing this. They spoke in German, which was their only language in common, but not the native tongue of either: _They say this project is for the good of our country, and for the good of mankind. I believe the opposite is true. I believe this technology brings about the demise of our way of life._

Of course, Becket said. It’s a matter of principle, Greenwich insisted. Becket recognized this, from a career dealing in Soviet defectors: the self-made moral structure built as a bulwark against the violent unpredictability of the system under which they lived. But Hermann recognized something else too, as Greenwich pressed on with his story: the proud, desperate, final transmission of a scientist. Whatever it was he had invented or perfected, he did fear it—but in another way, he was proud of it. And he did not want his work to go unremembered.

The project started, Greenwich said, in 1971.

The Razvedka picked up a new source in East Berlin—a British agent. He knew the location of a piece of technology that had been stolen from Wagner Airbase.

Wagner Airbase.

Hermann stared, his eye caught in the crease of the file. The thumping in his stomach was getting louder. He needed to check the clock. The clock. If he looked, would Sykes notice that all his color had just drained?

His hands were shaking. He set the file on the table and exhaled. He looked up at the clock. 12 minutes. He put his hands on his knees, straightened his back against the chair. There was not time to panic. He needed to finish. Sykes was wheeling his full cart into the stacks.

So it was Wagner. In a way, it was a relief to have confirmation. He realized now that he’d known already, because he had already been so frightened.

This connection explained, too, Becket’s reaction to Greenwich’s offer. It explained why he had gone to Berlin _himself_ to hear the story. Closing his eyes, Hermann recalled the last time he’d seen Becket—December 1963, on the canal bridge that had been their fallback rendezvous—the frown in his blue eyes when Hermann had told him no, it was gone.

After ten years sunk, those days were rising to the surface. Now Hermann was going to have to look at them.

He returned to the Greenwich file. The Abetilung had picked the agent up in the summer of 1971. (The file referenced a transmission; Hermann saw with a mix of relief and trepidation that it was a 2TP transmission, dated 19 July, 1971, processed by the Blueberry on 25 July. That meant he had automatic access. In fact, two years before, he had processed it himself.) The British agent had important technical information on the (redacted). Hermann knew the redacted word without a doubt: _the transmitter._

Becket asked, did Greenwich know who this British source was? He said he did not. Becket pushed, but it seemed Greenwich really knew nothing.

Now, the discussion truly began—the ins and outs of the technology. But the pages were almost entirely blacked out. Hermann checked the clock again. Seven minutes. He had no time.

He flipped quickly, past entire pages of Greenwich’s uninterrupted speech. The whole story was spilling out of him, his life’s work, all censored.

There were not many pages left. The transcript ended with Becket asking whether Greenwich had destroyed his work yet, like he’d planned. He said, _Tomorrow_.

Becket promised to get Greenwich out of East Germany. He said the information he’d shared was was more than enough to buy him a visa. But Greenwich seemed to know the demand implicit to his defection: _reconstruct the device, for our side_. And so Greenwich refused. To Hermann’s utter shock, he said he would not come. He would not rebuild it for England, or for anyone. He did not want to see it ever again.

Hermann didn’t believe it. Was this principled refusal—or just hopelessness? Greenwich was due to leave for Moscow in two days. Maybe he believed Becket could not carry off the extraction, maybe he had accepted his fate. Or maybe he believed he had a chance. Or maybe he had a martyr complex.

The transcript ended there, with Becket’s reassurances that he would contact Greenwich the next morning with an escape route. But Hermann, trembling furiously, flipped to the last page—he couldn’t refuse, he couldn’t _possibly_ refuse, there was _no_ principle strong enough—but that was it. The next page was a report from Becket to London, a week later. He had not heard from Greenwich again. He was returning to Vienna.

The last item was a memo from Vienna, dated June 1972. It reported the disappearance of embassy employee Bernard Birch.

The final page of the file was an index of cross-referenced files. There was a file on the technical specs Greenwich had recreated—the file Newton had seen all those months ago. There was the personnel file on Greenwich again. There was the Bernard Birch case file. There was Raleigh Becket’s personnel file, and Fisher’s, the East Berlin Head of Station. And there was the case file on the Wagner Airbase surveillance operation of 1963. Hermann nodded silently to no one. That file, too, was classed outside of the central registry, but he had no need to see it. He knew what was inside.

Hermann closed the blue file slowly. Sitting still, he listened for where Sykes was, among the stacks. His cart squeaked a few aisles down.

He gathered his things quickly and entered the stacks. In front of the shelf where Greenwich belonged, he loudly dropped everything, sending his cane clattering and his files scattering. He cursed a bit.

“All right, Gottlieb? I’m in the 1-B90s. Just bring the files to me.”

Hermann cursed under his breath. “Be right there.”

He gathered up the files. He had a moment of terror when he couldn’t locate Atlas in Greenwich’s place, then he found it. He pulled it, switched Atlas back out, and replaced Greenwich. Then he loudly stood and hurried a few rows over to Sykes.

“Can I have my bag back, please? I’d like to catch the 6:10,” he said, rudely dumping his files on top of Sykes’s others. Sykes, looking very put-upon, brought him back to the desk and made a production of retrieving Hermann’s bag. Hermann took it, blood roaring in his ears, and made his way to the lift and left.

He was standing on the wide stone Century steps. So it was Wagner. So it was the stolen technology, stolen from Wagner, stolen back, and stolen again. He didn’t know what it was, but did know where it came from. There was no longer any doubt.

The sun had come out, the sky was blue, and the wind was cold and higher than ever. It was going to be a beautiful spring night. He had to tell Newton—finally, he had to tell him everything. And it was all so impossible, absolutely absurd; Newton would believe it. He would be upset that Hermann had hidden it, but he would believe it.

*

He had started walking with the intention of collecting himself and then calling home, but as time and city blocks passed, Hermann only became more agitated. He turned corners without intent and crossed streets without looking. A church bell chimed and he realized he had been walking for half an hour, and that he didn’t know where he was.

Hermann took another turn and found himself in a stone arcade around the periphery of a market. On the other side of the arches, farmers were closing up their stands for the evening. He turned on impulse into the market, and walked until he found a flower stand.

He bought two bouquets: one large bouquet of lilies and one small handful of irises, which he tucked into his pocket. He paid in coins, and as he accepted his change, he felt a disorienting sense of anachronism—he wasn’t where—when—he belonged. Then he hurried back down the arcade and turned out an alley onto a crowded shopping street. He was in Berlin mode, he realized belatedly—op mode. He was in enemy territory again. Training, unbidden, had taken over.

He ducked into a chemist’s and stalled a few minutes, seeing if anyone else came in. Then he left again, and let the crowd carry him until he could orient himself. He was on the Strand. He walked with the bouquet in front of his chest, taking a tourist’s pace. He paused at a crowded bus stop, then when the bus arrived, stepped into the department store next to it instead. There, he bought a rolled-up poster and asked for a bag. In the vestibule, he set the large bouquet of flowers down on a window ledge. He took off his shoulder bag, removed his coat, folded it, put it in the shopping bag, then walked out the double doors with his shopping bag, his shoulder bag, and without his bouquet.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you everyone for your kind comments ♡♡ The next chapter is a big one, and it will be up Sept 20th.


	9. The Wagner Mission

**9\. The Wagner Mission**

IT WAS WELL PAST 7:00 when the phone finally rang. Newt, sitting in Hermann’s kitchen, bolted to his feet, grabbed the table to steady himself, then hurried into the living room. The phone had stopped ringing. He waited, counting in his head and swaying slightly on his feet. When it rang again, he jumped.

He picked up, and said nothing.

From the other end, there was a hubbub—a busy street. Not a word. Then church bells started ringing the quarter hour. Newt tried furiously to guess where he was calling from—right inside a cathedral, from the sound of it—then he heard the shriek of bus brakes and a garbled _something-something-hill, Old Bailey._

Hermann tapped the mouthpiece, then inhaled, like he’d thought better of it. The bells finished tolling. _St. Paul’s Cathedral_ , Newt’s brain announced, triangulation completed.

“Sorry for calling so late, darling,” said Hermann finally, in a tone of excruciating normalness. “Jim at work gave me tickets to the symphony tonight. I wonder if you’d like to go. They’re playing Mahler’s 9th at Henry Wood Hall. I know he isn’t your favorite,” said Hermann quickly, in an intonation completely alien to Newt, “But I think it would be good to get out.”

Newt could hear in his tone that he was not to reply. So he did not.

“I’ll wait at will call,” said Hermann. “At 8:00.”

He rang off.

Newt held the phone to his ear for another moment before hanging it up. He looked over at Laplace, who was curled self-protectively on Hermann’s armchair. He opened his mouth to say something, then closed it. He left the house in silence.

*

They should have arranged more word codes and rendezvous points. Then they wouldn’t have had to rely on the truth, and Newt wouldn’t have had to listen to Mahler.

Hermann liked Mahler, of course. They met in the lobby just as intermission ended, and trickled in with the thin crowd for the third movement. They sat in the back of the sparsely populated hall, in the dark cave below the balcony. Hermann spoke in a low voice, not taking his eyes off the pit. He had a handful of irises wrapped in paper; Newt had no idea why.

“In April of 1963, an aircraft crashed outside of East Berlin,” he said. “The Abteilung picked it up. The Razvedka wanted it, but the Germans got there first—there’s infighting on that side of the Wall too. They picked it up and brought it to Wagner Airbase for study.

“Our mission—my mission—was to monitor communications surrounding the base, and to spy on their research. I was made to understand that this was a very secret, very important mission. The Division wanted to know what it was that they were studying, and I believe they wanted to find a way to steal it.”

“Right,” said Newt, who knew this. “And it was an American plane?”

“No,” said Hermann. “No.”

Newt, who had lived the last ten years on that assumption, frowned at Hermann. “It wasn’t?”

“No, it was not American,” Hermann said, eyes still fixed on the orchestra. He switched the inexplicable irises from his right hand to his left. “It wasn’t a plane at all. It was a craft of unknown origin.”

Newt stared at him. Hermann went on:

“I left London at the end of April. When the Blueberry wrapped up. You remember.”

Newt remembered.

“They sent me up to the Estate for two weeks, for abridged field training. Contact protocols, technical report writing, self-defense, memorization, memorization, memorization. And radio,” he added. “With Caitlin.”

Newt nodded.

“After two weeks, my papers were ready. I was dispatched to East Berlin.”

He watched the orchestra for a moment, not appearing to hear it.

“Rennie was the CO, he ran the operation. Becket was the point-man, and I was the technical help.” Becket collected surveillance on the base, Hermann explained. He had a couple of soldiers on the inside, who provided him with drafts of internal memos, microfilm photos of technical reports, and, significantly, gossip. He was working on recruiting one of the scientists. Every week, he collected this technical data and folded it into a book, which he left in a dead drop for Hermann. At first, it was a defunct postbox, but later, Rennie rented a bus station locker and made two copies of the key.

Besides coordinating handoffs, dead drops, and debriefs, Rennie monitored radio chatter. His clerks transcribed it daily and treated the paper, then rolled it into a newspaper which was delivered to Hermann’s mailbox. Each night, Hermann read the radio transcripts and parsed any technical data that appeared.

“But I couldn’t,” Hermann said frankly.

“Parse it?”

“No. It made no sense,” said Hermann, and paused a moment. The third movement’s fugue was in a lull.

He saw the chipped formica-topped table that had served as his desk, and he saw Becket’s papers laid out on it. He’d had to drag the table into his bedroom from the kitchen—the flat had three tiny rooms, but only the bedroom was windowless. He smelled the tang of the chemical with which he treated the papers: acidic but off, like a rotted lemon. The report’s letters and numbers would swim to the surface under his lamp. Power outages had been frequent; sometimes brief, but sometimes lasting all night. Then, he’d had to work by flashlight.

Summer had dragged by in that darkened bedroom, without windows to let in the tepid wind. Hermann hunched over the reports, shirt sticking to his back, struggling to understand, failing, every moment expecting pounding on the front door.

“The Germans had extracted some unknown form of technology from this crashed object,” Hermann said. “But their findings were incoherent. If they knew what the device did, they weren’t saying so. My suspicion was that they didn’t, yet.”

“Yet?” said Newt.

Whatever it was, the Americans wanted it. So did the Russians. Wagner Airbase was fielding numerous information requests from the Razvedka, and declining many visitations. Rennie said that Bowen was shielding the Division’s mission from prying American requests as well. They probably had their own surveillance operation.

“The mission culminated in an operation to extract the device from the base. I wasn’t involved—I was to examine it, once Becket got it out. But he was only able to get one component.”

“So there were two parts?”

“Yes.”

“What happened to the other part?”

The fugue was crescendoing. Newt felt like a rabbit pursued down a dark hillside. The drummer was going wild on the timpanis.

Abruptly, it ended. Silence fell on the hall—the tense, inter-movement silence where every audience member prays that no one else will clap. Hermann’s hands were still folding and unfolding around the stems of the flowers, white ghosts in the dark gulf between the rows.

“Newton, why do you think everyone wanted this technology so badly?” he said in an undertone.

“I don’t know,” said Newt, as the music resumed, acutely melancholy.

“The Division, the Abteilung, the Razvedka, the CIA?”

“I would know if you’d just tell me what it _was_.”

“I don’t know what it was _,_ ” Hermann said, not reacting to his incendiary tone. “I never knew. I still don’t.”

“Then why,” said Newt impatiently. “Why did everyone want it so bad, since you obviously want me to ask.”

“Because,” said Hermann, “it didn’t come from the Americans. It didn’t come from the British, it didn’t come from the Soviets. It didn’t come from China or Japan or Australia or South America. It didn’t come from Earth at all. It crashed from outer space.”

*  *  *

“The Russians are coming,” Rennie said. “The General’s been trying to keep ‘em out, but it isn’t any use. The man’s pushing water uphill with a rake.”

He turned the page of his newspaper rather ostentatiously and, from behind it, gave Hermann a so-it-goes sort of look. He had a ruggedly lined face, though he could not have been 50 yet, and a rakish mustache. People said he looked like Vice Chief Bowen, though Hermann didn’t see it. (The mustache interfered, perhaps.) He had always looked, to Hermann, too real for this secret world—too much a character. He looked like the charming con man he had never really ceased to be. He didn’t look like someone who could write a technical report or speak six languages. Seated next to him on the bench, Hermann tried to picture him getting a drink with his friend Victor. It was a bizarre image.

They sat in a remote corner of an East Berlin park. Hermann hated park rendezvous. He felt exposed and unnatural. And what was more, it was cold.

Briefings with Rennie were always terribly casual. “What do you think of the General, Professor?” Rennie asked. He called Hermann ‘Professor,’ which Hermann understood to be some joke with Victor. “You read his chatter too, after all. I rather like him. Jolly optimistic fellow. I believe he thinks he’s got a handle on the situation, he really thinks he does.” He turned another page. “But the poor man has no idea, really. Works well enough for us, but when the Raz gets here, well.”

Hermann nodded. “Right, sir,” he said uncertainly, and Rennie gave a small laugh; he had long given up telling Gottlieb not to call him ‘sir.’

It was late November. For months, the German general in charge of Wagner Airbase had been keeping the Russians at bay. The Raz had been having one of their purging seasons, but now they were sending a delegation at last. They would requisition the device, most likely, and take it back to Moscow, and the General, bless him, would be powerless to stop it.

“It’s our last chance to get our hands on this device before it gets whisked away. But really, I don’t know about this plan of young Becket’s,” said Rennie, scanning the football column. “I met the man, his inside man. The one he’s paying to do the deed. The _private_. He seems awfully _green_. Trust a child to pick an even younger child to do his dirty work.”

Herman nodded, fiddling with the handle of his cane. He was watching a distant man in an overcoat, walking his small dog over the rise.

Rennie saw his face and followed his gaze without moving his head. He flicked his eyes back to his paper, apparently seeing no threat.

“Has he told you about it?”

“His plan? Not in any detail,” Hermann said.

“Well, I’ve got my doubts. Told him as much.” He turned another page. “But he won’t get anywhere if I’m breathing down his neck. If it works, it works. And if it fails, it fails. And we’re all fired!” He folded the newspaper suddenly into his lap. “Or worse.”

“Quite,” said Hermann nervously. Rennie leaned back on the bench, slinging his elbow over the back. He stretched his long legs and gazed across the empty field of dead grass.

Hermann’s breath rose in front of him. He watched the man and the dog disappear into a copse of bare trees.

“So, Professor,” said Rennie. “Let’s talk about where you fit into this plan.”

Hermann’s stomach reeled with dread and excitement. “Yes sir.”

“Once Becket gets it out, he’s going to leave it for you—not in the locker, in dead drop C, that’s more secluded. That spot should give you enough privacy. Take it out, take a look, make some notes, then put it back. I’ll come collect it that night.”

Hermann considered this with a frown.

“But sir...” he began faintly.

“What’s that?”

Rennie was deaf in one ear from a wartime injury.

“But sir,” he said more clearly, sitting forward. “I’m meant to examine this device... on the spot? That seems quite risky. And it would have to be quite a cursory examination, I mean, I’d hardly learn enough to write a report of any substance.”

“Substance? No, that’s not the idea,” said Rennie, crossing his legs. “That’s for the London boys. No, no. I know. Think of it this way: I don’t expect this to come off. Becket’s too smart for his own good. There isn’t any way he’ll get that thing out. But _if_ he _does,_ ” he said, and tapped Hermann’s arm with his knuckles, “ _You_ are the insurance. I need a second pair of eyes on this thing. This operation has been six months in the making. We get it tomorrow, we could lose it the next day. I need your notes on this before it gets couriered off to London.”

“Oh,” said Hermann, trying and failing to hide his disappointment.

“Ah,” said Rennie. “You did want a closer look, didn’t you?”

Hermann glanced at him.

More than almost anything else, he wanted to examine that device.

“Well...”

Rennie grinned. That conspiratorial smile was the closest he ever got to mentioning what they never acknowledged. What he was impossibly, reassuringly blasé about.

_Alien technology._

“I know,” said Rennie. “But if this works, maybe they’ll send us home, and you can get a real look.”

Hermann doubted it, but nodded. “All right.”

Rennie stood up suddenly, dropped the newspaper onto the bench, then stretched, facing Hermann. “Christ, it’s cold,” he said. “You seen that fellow before?”

A young man in nondescript clothing was making his way along the path, approaching from behind Rennie.

“Just look, tell me if you know his face,” Rennie said, still stretching his arms above his head, facing towards Hermann. Hermann looked. The man was studiously avoiding his eyes. Hermann looked back at Rennie and shook his head.

Rennie dropped his arms.

“Boy’s been following me, I think,” Rennie said in a low voice, but not low enough, Hermann thought—he was nearly on them—then Rennie turned quickly round and the man collided with his shoulder.

“Ah!”

“Pardon me,” said Rennie in easy German. “So sorry, sir.”

The man shook his head and hurried on. Rennie walked quickly away, and Hermann watched him go, certain he had taken the man’s wallet.

*  *  *

It was a warmer evening 600 miles and ten years away. The June dusk was bright, and they were walking down the blue-shadowed street slowly. They moved north, towards the river. They made a noticeably asymmetrical couple—Newt listing to the side, Hermann leaning heavily on his cane. He had done a lot of walking today, and there was still more ahead. Every few minutes, Newt would put his hand on Hermann’s elbow and look fixedly forward. When the horizon realigned, he would let go again.

“The Razvedka was coming, and Becket wanted to get the device out before they arrived,” Hermann explained in the low monotone voice he had adopted.

“You mean devices?”

“It was one device, then,” Hermann said. “One device with two components. That was how we thought of it. And how the Germans thought of it. But Becket only managed to get half.”

“He—wow,” said Newt, taking Hermann’s arm again. “He pulled it off? It worked?”

Hermann nodded. “Yes. By half.”

“Impressive,” he said, letting go of Hermann’s arm. Hermann felt surprisingly bereft when he did. They were in public, and it wouldn’t be proper, but he wished Newton would keep hold.

“We can sit down,” Hermann said, again.

“No, let’s keep walking. It’s easier to walk and talk.”

They crossed a busy street. They had almost reached the Thames. Newton was a surprisingly attentive audience. He had taken the revelation of extraterrestrial technology with impressive equanimity—so far.

“He left it for me in dead drop C, as planned.”

“When was this?”

Hermann inhaled. “December 5th,” he said. “Thursday.”

“Oh...” said Newton, touching Hermann’s arm again, but not for balance. “Oh, no.”

“He got it out,” Hermann said grimly, “And the Bowen scandal broke 48 hours later.”

“Christ,” said Newt.

Hermann nodded.

They crossed the last street that ran parallel to the Thames, and turned to continue walking along it. Newt ran a hand along the railing; the river ran silently on the other side.

“Becket extracted it on the 5th, and left it in dead drop C that night. I came the next morning, Friday the 6th. But it was gone. The drop was empty.”

The device had gone missing. He’d emergency called Becket for a crash meeting. They had met on a canal bridge that evening. Becket had no idea who could have taken it. He swore he had left it there. Hermann didn’t know whether to believe him.

He signaled Rennie, requesting another crash meeting. Had Becket stolen it? Someone else? Had he lied about securing it in the first place?

It was the morning of December 7th. (Newt winced.) Hermann left his flat and took his usual route to the university, which took him past Rennie’s office, so he could check the window for any signal.

Today, the potted plant was in the window. That was a code red.

Hermann had gotten no other signal or warning. Feeling panicked, he hurried onward. Were they in danger? Were they blown? What was the emergency? At a newsstand on a corner, he found out:

_High-Ranking British Intelligence Official Missing, Wanted for Treason._

Below, a photo of Robert Bowen. An ID photo, suit and tie, one drooping eyelid, no smile.

“I panicked,” Hermann said.

They were sitting on a bench in a small park next to the river. It was late.

“I would have too, I’m sure,” Newt said fairly.

“No, I... I didn’t know what to do. I wasn’t trained for this. I needed help, I needed... orders. So I broke protocol. I went back to the field office.”

*

“Rennie’s office was disguised as a law firm. I smelled smoke as soon as I walked in. All the drawers and file cabinets were open, and gutted. The file clerk—the last one left, apparently—was burning papers in the grate. He looked at me, didn’t stop, just told me to ‘Lock that fucking door’ behind me.

“Rennie was upstairs in his office. He jumped when I came in, then saw who I was, and asked what the hell I was doing there.

“His office was in total chaos too. He had keys in his hand, I think, and he was packing a bag full of files.

“I asked him why his clerk was burning everything. He asked if I had heard, and then said, ‘If Robert’s corrupted, then our whole operation is too. He’ll have told them all about it. We’re blown, and so are most of our European outfits, I should think. You’ve got to get out, Professor.’”

They were sitting on a bench facing away from the river. Hermann was folding and unfolding his symphony ticket between his fingers, the same creases over and over again. His eyes were fixed on the lamp post across the street.

“I was paralyzed. And I didn’t believe it—didn’t want to believe it,” he corrected himself. “I said, maybe it wasn’t true. Maybe the papers were wrong. Maybe it was a false flag, or, or a false rumor—a mistake—Rennie just laughed. He believed it. He accepted that his friend was a turncoat—he accepted it, and acted right away. I didn’t even _know_ Bowen, and I couldn’t accept it.”

Hermann started tearing the ticket carefully in half along the crease lines. Newt stayed silent, chewing his lip in sympathetic anxiety. He was struck by the level of detail with which Hermann recalled this scene, and braced himself for worse.

“I asked—if he had heard from London, directly. A dispatch. He stopped packing, and I said, ‘Can I see it?’ He said no. I said I didn’t believe _him._ Maybe this wasn’t true at all—I wanted proof, concrete proof. I was on the verge of—I don’t know, genuine hysterics, he was like stone, and I had no idea what was happening or what to do—then he just stopped, and asked if I smelled smoke.

“‘Yes,’ I said, ‘Your clerk is down there burning your bloody files _._ ’

“He went to the window, and looked down at the street.

“Then he asked whether I had been followed.”

He balled up the bits of paper in his fist and threw them onto the sidewalk, then leaned forward and covered his eyes with his hands.

“Someone started pounding on the front door, downstairs. And yelling. It was the police.

“Rennie jumped back from the window and pointed at me and told me to get out, _now,_ down the fire escape, or we would both be arrested. ‘Or worse.’

“I could really smell smoke now. I think that the clerk’s fire had gotten out of control—I could hear him downstairs, shouting over the police. Then the door burst open and we heard two gunshots.

“Rennie rounded on me and yelled ‘Go!’ and I went. Out the back door of the office. To the fire escape. Adrenaline was starting to do its job, even if I didn’t want to. I didn’t want this—any of it. And I didn’t want Rennie’s sacrifice. I didn’t trust him. _None_ of it was right. But I could hear the police and smell the fire, and I went out the door, closed it, and locked it.”

Hermann opened his eyes and sat up. He tipped his head back.

“I locked the door, then I hesitated. There was a window in the door. I... waited. I shouldn’t have. I should have just run. The police came into Rennie’s office, guns in hand. Rennie was yelling at them. It was the Stasi, not the Abteilung. They were looking for a man with a cane. They were looking for me. Rennie, he kept saying this word over and over, but I couldn’t make it out—was it a code word? Was it in German?—Whatever it was, it was to no avail. The policeman shot him in the chest. He went down. Then I ran.

“Hobbled, rather. The stairwell was full of smoke. I heard one of them yell to search the building for _der Mann mit dem Stock,_ but I was already halfway down. I came out in the back alley. It took me to a different street, and I got into a cab. I went to the train without stopping at my flat—I thought they would be searching it already.”

As the cab had sped away, he had turned around and looked out the rear window. A block away, a column of smoke was rising. A firetruck wooshed by, then an ambulance.

*

“How did you get out?”

“Out?”

Newt nodded. “Of Germany?”

“Oh—oh,” said Hermann, looking away again. “I got lucky, really. I only had my German passport with me, so I couldn’t go by air. I took the train north, to Rostock. I took the water route to Copenhagen, and went to their airport. This was Sunday. When I called you.”

“Stop, stop,” said Newt, holding up his hands. “The ‘water route’? What the hell is that?”

“A boat, Newton,” said Hermann, his tone rising to match Newt’s. “They travel across water to transport humans and cargo.”

“But how did you—”

“Rennie had told me about the route. It was a backdoor solution, a shipping company we sometimes did business with—or he did—not strictly our outfit, more of a contractor—it was risky, but—”

“ _I’ll_ say!” Newt interrupted.

“—but I had no other choice—”

“If _he_ was compromised, and _you_ were compromised, how could you use his _route,_ Hermann, that is so _incredibly_ dangerous—”

“This? _This_ is what you find outrageous?” Hermann hissed.

“That was crazy! That was craziness!”

“Will you please settle down?”

“What did you do, ride in the cargo hold with the crates of bootleg liquor?”

“I made it to Denmark and flew back to London,” Hermann finished, talking over him. “You picked me up. That was it.”

“That was it?”

“Yes.”

It clearly was not. Newt cursed himself mentally. He had slipped up—after a long night of delicately leading Hermann where he needed to go, he had let himself get pissy. Now this too-blunt question had severed their dialogue into a dead end. Hermann was tired, he thought to himself. He needed help him relax.

“Hermann, it’s late. Let’s go home.”

“Home?” Hermann was looking at the lamp post again. “We can’t go home.”

“To your place?”

“No. No, it’s not safe. It might not be safe. We can’t be sure.” He looked back at Newt. “We need to go to a hotel.”

“But—” said Newt. “We could stay with someone—” Hermann was shaking his head.

They felt a shared homesick disappointment, the loss of a promised rest.

“Did you feed the cat?” Hermann asked.

Newt nodded.

Hermann hailed a cab.

*

While Hermann showered, Newt went to the shop in the lobby of their seedy hotel. It was relatively clean, but far enough from the beaten path to allow two men with no luggage to rent one room. Hermann said they would find a better place the next day. In the lobby shop, Newt bought a pack of cigarettes, took one out, asked the clerk for a light, went outside to smoke it, then cursed, threw the whole pack out, and went back into the shop. He bought toothbrushes instead, and a sewing kit.

When he returned to their room, Hermann was sitting on the bed in his undershirt, his unbuttoned shirt over it. He was calmly dismantling the room’s telephone.

“Dude,” said Newt. He threw his purchases onto the bed and went to wash his mouth out.

When he emerged, Hermann was sitting on the edge of the bed, hands folded, telephone in pieces on the bedside table. The room was small, with lurid green wallpaper above wainscoting that was painted to look like hardwood. There was one light. Most of their light was borrowed from the streetlamp outside.

“You have more questions,” Hermann said, looking up at him.

“About a million,” he said, approaching, “but most of them, you don’t have answers to.”

Newt sank onto the floor and leaned back against the side of the bed. He began unlacing his shoes, and glanced at the clock on the table.

“It’s only 11.”

"Mm," said Hermann vaguely.

Newt tilted his head and rested it against Hermann’s knee. Hermann sighed and ran a hand through Newt’s disorderly hair.

“You ought to shower, too.”

Newt laughed. “No need to be rude."

Hermann exhaled what passed for a laugh. “I didn’t mean it _that_ way.”

Newt patted his knee. “Why were you so suspicious of Rennie?”

Hermann sighed. “There were... a few reasons. Everyone knew about his ties to the, I suppose, ‘criminal elements.’ Someone has to deal with them; but I suspected his ties were mutually beneficial in a manner inconsistent with the Division charter.”

Newt laughed at this exceptionally circumspect casting of aspersions.

“Of more concern to me, still, is this: why was he packing up files he should have been burning? What was the code word he was trying to use on the police? And who stole the device from the dead drop? The only people who knew it was there were Becket and Rennie. It had to have been one of them.”

“Or you,” Newt added.

“Or me,” said Hermann ruefully.

“So what—did you think Rennie was just selling secrets—just a little corrupt? Or did you think he was a double agent, like Bowen?”

Hermann’s silence lasted longer than Newt thought it should have.

“Yes. There was something else. It was in... late July, I believe. I arrived to a meeting with Rennie in the park. Instead of Charles Rennie, a stranger sat down next to me.”

Newt tipped his head back on the mattress and looked up and Hermann.

“I’d never seen him before. He was—nondescript. German. Sport coat. Gave me an oblique sort of speech. But he was offering me something. He was vague, but he made it... understood.”

“Offering what?”

Hermann looked at Newt’s upside-down green eyes.

“He seemed to think I’d be interested in the arenas of research and... freedom of domestic arrangements that a life further on the other side of the Iron Curtain might afford me.”

Newt’s frown spread into wide-eyed shock. He sat up, putting his arm on the bed and facing Hermann.

“He was trying to _recruit_ you? As a—as a—”

“Yes.”

“And he knew who you _were_?”

“Yes.”

“And he knew you were—”

“Yes.”

“But _how_? Rennie?”

“I think so.”

Newt turned away in affront. “Holy shit,” he said. “But you turned him down.”

Hermann was silent.

Newt turned back around. “Hermann?” he said shrilly.

Hermann closed his eyes, then opened them again. “I agreed to consider it, and to meet him again.”

He didn’t look away from Newton’s wide, shocked eyes, but his expression was pained.

“Hermann...”

“Please—don’t. I said I would consider it. We were meant to meet two weeks later. The next weekend, I went home to London, for debriefing. August.”

“Oh,” said Newt quietly.

Hermann frowned slightly, less with disapproval and more like he was trying not to cry.

“When that agent approached me... I was alone. The mission was half dead; I saw no future for myself in the Division, and I had no future at home. You and I had... cut ties. As far as I could see, no one would care if I... disappeared.” He exhaled. “I didn’t _want_ to defect, but it was... a new possibility.”

Newt’s hand was resting on the bedspread. Hermann put his hand over it.

“When I got back from London, I felt... better, but I was still confused. I didn’t know if I should still go to that meeting. Then, the morning of, I got a letter from you. The first one in eight months.”

His voice shook, but didn’t break. He squeezed Newt’s hand. Newt felt like his stomach was being strangled. He turned his hand upward so that Hermann could thread his fingers through.

“So I stayed home,” Hermann said simply.

Newt nodded slowly, and rested his chin on the bed.

“And that’s why you think Rennie was working for the other side? You think he tipped them off that you were... volatile?”

Hermann had let go of his hand and was wiping his eyes with dignity. “I take issue with your choice of adjective, but yes.”

“Did you ever tell anyone about this?”

“Only one person.”

Hermann swallowed. Newt folded his arms on the edge of the bed and rested his chin on them.

“When I got home,” said Hermann, “it was several days before I was able to speak with anyone... But eventually, I got ahold of Victor.

“He wanted to know where Rennie was. ‘Charles.’ He’d had no word from him. Did I know where he was? And how was I able to get out, if Charles was not? He was... quite frantic. I had never seen him in that state—or any state, for that matter.

“I was so relieved to finally have someone to tell that I told him everything. I told him about the recruiter, the device, Becket, the police, and... and Rennie’s death.”

Hermann trailed off, remembering the terrible look that had come into Victor’s eyes then, and never left them.

“I told him everything,” he said again, “except for agreeing to a second meeting with the recruiter. But I did tell him my suspicions about Rennie. He didn’t like that at all—he didn’t like hearing that I doubted his... that I doubted Rennie. It was insensitive, I suppose, after Bowen had just stabbed him in the back, to suggest that he should check for two knives.”

Hermann glanced nervously at the door.

“He was very angry. I don’t think he ever forgave me.”

“For what? For Rennie’s death, or for casting aspersions?”

Hermann shrugged. “Both. Either. For surviving at all. They were very close.”

Newt made a face.

Seeing no reason to delay beginning repairs on this decade-old psychological damage, he said, “It wasn’t your fault, you know.”

Hermann frowned. “What?”

“You obviously feel guilty. You shouldn’t. You were out of your depth. And anyway, Rennie would have probably bit it, regardless of whether you were there or not.”

Hermann squinted at him, his feelings so far removed from Newton’s blunt diagnosis that he could muster no actual offense. Guilty? That didn’t even begin to cover it. But how could he explain the inescapable knowledge that he had led a man to his death, or the price of an unpayable debt to someone he had not even trusted—and still did not? And the interest on it, extracted from him for ten years with Victor’s every cold look, brimming with the blame he knew he deserved?

The knowledge that he had almost been one of them?

“So that was the end of the Wagner operation,” said Hermann. “I was debriefed. Becket showed up later, told Victor some story, and the case was closed. I suspect the Americans swooped into the space we left. And I think they had more success with their heist, because they must have stolen the second component.”

“The transducer?” said Newt.

Hermann nodded.

“And now, some descendant of the original is in your ear.”

“So where’s the transmitter?”

“In my safe deposit box.”

“Ha, ha. I mean the original.”

“I don’t know. I don’t know whether it was Becket or Rennie who originally took it, but it resurfaced in Germany two years ago.”

“Resurfaced?”

Hermann rubbed his eyes as Newt climbed onto the bed.

“Yes. I read the Greenwich file today...” But suddenly he felt so tired.

“Yeah? So that’s what Greenwich was working on?”

Hermann nodded, eyes closed.

“Okay, so, if I’ve got this timeline straight,” said Newton, sitting up with the air of someone starting a speech. “In 1963...”

Hermann sighed, rubbing the bridge of his nose.

“...A UFO crashes in Germany,” said Newton, driving on despite what Hermann considered obvious cease-and-desist signals. “Fine. Totally. I accept it.”

“Do you?” said Hermann with unexpected force, dropping his hand and looking up at Newt. “You’ve certainly taken it with an unusual level of credulity.”

“What—should I not believe you? Did you want me to be more shocked? Ooh, aah, aliens! I saw a UFO as a kid, you know. I’ve told you that. In Cambridge. My roommate was all, ‘It’s just a plane, Geiszler,’ but _hello_ —”

“Newton—stop, please, just stop,” said Hermann. “I’m sorry. I’m exhausted. I’ve got to sleep.”

“Oh,” said Newt. “Sorry.”

He fell silent with a heavy abrupt shame. Hermann went to brush his teeth. Newt watched him go. After ten years, did he still not know how to handle his partner’s worst emotions? Or, worse—had this confession revealed some unknown, insensitive facet of Hermann’s character? Someone who lashed out in shame?

If Newt Geiszler had possessed accessing skills to match his memory banks, he would have recognized the person who had lashed out as the cornered, frightened mathematician he had met eleven years before, the one who had accepted his Blueberry designs and rejected him. After all, that was the Hermann who had gone to East Berlin, and so he was bound to appear now to give his testimony. Newt had forgotten the way Hermann had once made him feel—excessive and overwrought and ashamed—because he’d forgiven him for it so long ago.

“We can talk more in the morning,” Hermann said when he returned. “I’ll set the alarm early.”

“Are you going to the office tomorrow?” Newt asked, looking up at him as he took off his shirt.

“Yes,” said Hermann. “Could you put the clothing out to be laundered?”

Newt nodded, accepting the clothes surrendered to him. Hermann climbed into bed and was asleep in minutes. Newt, still sitting at the end of the bed, stared for a few minutes at Hermann’s sleeping face. His foot pressed lightly into Newt’s leg. He wished he could hear what Hermann was thinking, what he was _really_ thinking. Not because he suspected that Hermann harbored other secrets—Newt’s mind did not work that way. He just didn't understand Hermann's distress, and was in the habit of blaming all their fractious moments on Hermann’s emotional reticence.

After a few minutes, Newt stood up carefully, gathered the pieces of the telephone, and switched off the light. He brought the pieces into the bathroom, threaded the cord under the door, and shut it. He laid everything out on the bathmat. As he put the phone back together, he examined each piece. He wasn’t really expecting to find a bug or wire. He didn't.

When it was reassembled, he considered it for a moment. Then with the tension of a question, he got to his feet and shut off the bathroom light. He let the darkness settle around him and sharpen his other senses. A faint orange strip glowed under the door. He heard the furnace below, the pipes above. Distantly, the traffic. And below it all, the quiet ring that had persisted all day in his left ear.

He had tried several ways of amplifying that tone, while alone in Hermann’s flat. He had put a glass over his ear to create a resonating chamber; he had pressed his ear against the radio and turned the dial. But he had found no difference, no amplification. Not until he’d answered Hermann’s phone call.

Newt lifted the receiver to his left ear and listened to the empty dial tone in the dark. Nothing. He pressed 1. The dial tone stopped. The ringing in his ear was still faint. He tried 2, 3, 4, all the way to 8. He stopped, and pressed 8 again. The 8 tone made a resonance. The ringing in his ear seemed to widen, like it was a tuning fork and the 8 tone was the right note at last. Newt pressed it again and again, tapping out the rhythm of Good Vibrations and humming it under his breath, listening to the standing wave ring through his skull like a church bell tolling.


	10. The Tale of Bernard Birch

**10\. The Tale of Bernard Birch**

ON THE GROUNDS of the boys’ school where Hermann had spent most of his childhood, there was a wide, deep lake. By day, the blue lake was where they learned to swim, to row, and later to sail; but past dusk, the water was black. Unsupervised swimming was strictly forbidden. A boy had drowned there some years ago. He’d dived too deep, his ankles had gotten tangled in the pondweed, and he hadn’t resurfaced.

The circumstances of this drowning were muddled zealously by generations of schoolboys. He was said to have been pushed in, lured in, eaten by a giant snake, or to have done it on purpose. And in the dormitory mythos, it merged with the other object of interest at the lake, which was the dark underwater shape in the northeast corner.

On rare occasions when the boys did manage to sneak down, they secreted a boat out of the boathouse. The opposite shore was dense, dark forest. They never ventured there. Instead, they paddled to the northeast corner of the lake. The water was clear enough to see that, at the bottom, there was a big dark shape. This, school staff had told them, was simply a big rock. Many boys believed it was a wrecked ship, a sunken bridge, or a crashed warplane; one believed it to be an alien craft.

But none of the fantastical explanations for the drowning were more terrifying to Hermann than the real one. And the mystery of the rock—or ship—paled next to the danger of drowning, dragged down by mundane, malicious weeds.

Myths or not, the lake became a permanent fixture in the landscape of his mind. Secrets were large black shapes on the lake floor. Visions of escape were set on that distant wooded shore. Even as an adult, he had nightmares in which he snuck out to swim, against the rules, only to find his legs entangled and the air vanishing from his lungs. But tonight, he dreamed he was rowing on the lake’s flat black surface. The prow of the boat pushed the mist aside. When he reached the northeast corner, he stopped paddling and peered over the edge. His pale face stared back at him. As the dark shipwreck took shape below, something in it quivered and moved. Suddenly he realized that the face in the water was not his. It was Charles Rennie’s. Strong white hands leapt out of the water and yanked Hermann in, dragging him all the way down to the bottom.

*

Tuesday, June 5th

The morning started poorly when Hermann discovered that Newton had forgotten about the laundry. There was no room service—it was not that kind of hotel—and Hermann refused to risk going out to eat. So he left Newt and returned with sandwiches in a bag and paper cups of coffee from the lobby machine. While they ate, he told Newton all that he had learned from the Greenwich file, trying his uncaffeinated best not to snap at him.

“I want to find out what happened to Birch,” Hermann said. “What actually happened.”

“You don’t buy the party line? Kidnapping?”

“No,” said Hermann. “I never did.”

He began collecting his things for work. Newt, still eating, watched him do so with unacknowledged envy. He suddenly dreaded the long day alone in that tiny room.

“You should talk to Stella. Stella McLuhan,” Newt said. Hermann, tying his tie in front of the mirror, nodded curtly.

“Yes.”

“You already thought of that?”

Hermann hadn’t, though it was the obvious thing—everyone knew she and Birch were friends. She’d been treated rather badly in the fallout. In fact, she had been one of Hermann’s teachers at GCHQ. She now ran one of the coding bays upstairs. But he hadn’t had a conversation with her in years, and he dreaded asking any living person a question about this case that they could repeat.

He simply nodded into the glass, trying to keep his unwarranted annoyance in silent check. Newt felt it nonetheless. He came to the mirror to fix Hermann’s collar and straighten his tie, because he only knew how to run at a problem; but even when he kissed his partner on the cheek, Hermann studiously avoided his eyes and told him to stay in the room, not speak with anyone, and wait until his call after work. When Hermann left, Newt collapsed back onto the bed with a sigh.

*

Hermann commuted alone. It was a relief, the solitude, but he still felt anxious and unresolved. He had expected to feel differently after his Wagner confession—relieved, or absolved, or at least unburdened—but all he felt was touchy and tense. It wasn’t Newton’s fault, but he couldn’t help it.

Today he would follow the Greenwich file to Bernard Birch. Birch was a disgraced former cipher clerk. He had been an energetic, friendly man, somewhat eccentric, once of military intelligence. A few years ago, he had been posted to Vienna. There, working in the secluded Division offices inside the British embassy, he’d enciphered and deciphered messages to and from Becket and his staff. Then one Monday morning last July, he had not come into the office.

Rumors had flown through the support staff networks, a whisper web more robust than even the best op could hope to grow. Hermann remembered hearing of Birch’s disappearance—the radio lab had been among the first in Century to learn the news. Support staff witnessed all of the action from the sidelines. Stories of defections, kidnappings, and nervous breakdowns passed with fearful exaggeration among them. Cipher clerks, with their high levels of access and high-stakes daily tasks, were known flight risks. No one had believed Birch could be the type.

But the investigation had found otherwise. They’d discovered a train ticket to East Berlin. In his flat, they found a microfilm camera: British-made, but not issued to him. When his phone records were requisitioned from the Viennese phone company, they found a regular Friday night phone call from a long-distance number.

His betrayal sent a tremor of shock through Newt and Hermann’s strata; even as the upper floors pursued their investigation, their peers whispered anxiously. Birch became a traitor to most in the service, a tragedy to those who had known him.

Whitehall exercised control over the story—in what minor press he received, he was called a ‘deserter.’ There had been no expectation of ever seeing him again. Then in late September, 1972, he had reappeared.

He was discovered in Prague. He was insensible. Rumor had had it that he was damaged beyond even speech. He’d been returned to London, where an inquiry had been launched, which the press had caught wind of, and soon Whitehall was in another minor intelligence scandal.

The headlines ran amok. _Repatriated Traitor: Disgraced British Intelligence Officer Returned at Taxpayer Expense. The Spy Who Sold Secrets and Kept His NHS Card. Send Him Back to the Russians!_ Whitehall’s intelligence committee and the Division’s spokesperson took what had been leaked and shaped it into a palatable story. Birch had been lured, they said, kidnapped, and then tortured. They said that his return was part of a prisoner trade.

Hermann had always had his doubts. He’d never understood how Birch, of all people, could become a traitor. What had lured him from his post? What had they offered him?

And what in God’s name had happened to him over there?

And now Hermann knew that his desertion had coincided approximately with Greenwich’s. Coincidence? Perhaps. But some instinct told Hermann it was an important thread. It was not the Greenwich connection alone that raised his suspicions; it was the subsequent cover-up, and that scent of Division secrecy and mismanagement which had troubled him all along.

Stella might know something; but she was only a friend. She hadn’t worked with him in Vienna—there was no reason she would know. No reason to involve her in the inquiry. No reason to trust her, really.

He held onto a pole as the train lurched forwards. Somebody holding onto the same pole had the word _STAMPS_ scrawled across the back of his hand, and below, in smaller letters, _juice, bread._ He thought of Newton. He would have to go shopping before he went home. To the hotel, that was. And they would have to move hotels. There was so much to do, and he felt alone doing it.

*

Hermann spent the morning in the computer bay, entering the cumulative Orpheus data. The IBM had been purchased in the last few years. It had a massive memory, but it was a bit beyond the Division, as an institution. They didn’t really know how to integrate the database into their venerable intelligence processes. As a result, it was understaffed, and Hermann and Wesley had to help with the hands-on programming.

Unlike the Blueberry, a processor (and now a bit outdated), the IBM was a database computer. It contained personnel records, including travel records. Hermann hadn’t yet had time to write a program to make these matches, so they had to enter the data manually.

Referring to Victor’s list, given to them by Preston, they looked up a personnel code in the paper directory. They entered that number, calling up the file. Then they directed the computer to interface with Orpheus’s transmission record. If somebody’s travel records matched the locations and dates of the Orpheus transmissions, they were the one.

As a former employee of GCHQ, the computing and surveillance headquarters of the British secret services, Hermann had little patience for doing this the old-fashioned way—least of all to hunt for a culprit who probably didn’t exist.

“I left GCHQ twelve years ago,” Hermann was saying to Wesley, “And I swear the machines they had _then_ were more efficient than this one.”

“It’s a shame,” Wesley said, paging through the directory looking for a Smith. “A lot of computing progress was lost after the war, you know. All destroyed. Top secret. Really a shame.” This was one of Wesley’s frequent complaints. “I used to know Tommy Flowers, you know.”

“I don’t think you’re meant to be telling me that, Dr. Wesley,” Hermann said flatly. “Do you have the ID number?”

“Oh—yes,” said Wesley, and read it off. Hermann entered it into the computer. “We only went to school together,” he added, as the IBM hummed. Hermann ignored him and limped down the bay to where the dot matrix was whining. He watched the output emerge. He could see there was no match.

“Negative,” he said, tearing it off. “Wesley—let’s do a batch in a row and check them all at once. It’ll be more efficient.”

“Certainly, certainly, Hermann,” Wesley said, standing up from his chair. “I’ve just got to step out. I’ll only be a moment.”

Frustrated, Hermann sighed out his nose as Wesley shuffled out. Then he realized that since he was alone, he could look up Birch’s personnel file.

He hurried to the directory, looked up Birch’s personnel number, and entered it into the IBM. The machine printed his record at the other end of the room. Hermann hurried back over and tore off the output.

To his disappointment, it was less than two pages. A bulleted summary of his government career. His defection—his first known contact with the other side—was dated several months before his desertion. His return was referenced in the final paragraph, vaguely. It said only that he was sighted in Prague, and not by whom.

Birch’s employment had officially terminated October 25th, 1972. There was no information about where he was now.

Who had found him? Where had they hidden him away?

Who had sanitized his record?

Hermann heard footsteps and hurried to the paper shredder. When Wesley came back in, he said quickly, “No match.”

He returned to their tedious task, frustrated. The full case file for Birch’s disappearance would be in Century Central, but he didn’t remember the number, so he couldn’t steal it—he’d have to ask outright, and he didn’t want to leave a trail.

He was brooding on the problem, paying even less attention to his labmate’s Fermat chatter than usual, when a different name brought him out of his reverie.

“What’s that?”

“Newt? He’s still out, is he?”

Wesley had paused with the paper directory open.

“Yes—I suppose,” said Hermann.

“Weeks said he’s sick,” Wesley said. “You haven’t heard from him, then?”

“No,” said Hermann, but Wesley, he realized, would not believe that. “But I’ll call him tonight and find out how he is.” Wesley thought of them as friends, and would notice an absence of contact if he noticed anything at all.

“He’s at home, then?” Wesley said, turning a page and avoiding Hermann’s eye. “I thought he was at the conference.”

“Don’t know,” said Hermann. “I thought so too.”

Wesley’s eyes roved down the columns of names. “Only with all this, and with Orpheus being at the conference...”

“Orpheus?” Hermann said sharply.

Wesley looked at him, frowning. “The signals?”

“Oh. Oh, of course,” said Hermann. The new Orpheus signals from the weekend, the ones sent from nearby the Estate: in all the confusion, he had entirely forgotten. “Of course. Excuse me. But Victor is exaggerating this whole business... If you want my opinion, Orpheus doesn’t exist.”

If he had been less distracted, he might have noticed Wesley’s silence, his uncomfortable nod. Or he might not have. Hermann was not in the habit of taking Dr. Wesley seriously.

At lunch, Hermann went to the crypto registry to look up the July ‘71 2TP transmission. Their clerk, Aalvar, was leaning back in his chair with a newspaper over his face. He greeted Hermann by name without removing the paper, and told him to find whatever he needed quietly. Hermann searched the 2TP directory and checked the archive. And he left with a queasy combination of frustration and vindication, for the transmission was missing from the files, and its interception had been scrubbed from the record.

*

After an afternoon of hand-wringing, Hermann decided he would go upstairs to the coding bay and ask to check their records. He didn’t have clearance, but he had tentative hopes of leveraging his title.

But these hopes were dashed when he saw Berkeley at the counter, chatting with the young woman behind it.

“Ah, Gottlieb!” he said, grinning widely.

Berkeley was a case officer, ex-Army, with all the attendant self-importance and machismo. He was a contemporary of Becket’s. He’d recently been promoted to the North African desk, so he could have no reason to be in this office other than to harass the clerk.

Hermann disliked him immensely.

“You’re busy,” Hermann said, hovering in the doorway. “I’ll come back later.”

“No, no,” said Berkeley and the clerk at once, in two different tones. Hermann hesitated, then came in.

“How's it going, down in the basement? Hermann here works in the lab," he added, to the clerk. "He doesn't get out much. Where’s your little friend?” he said, back to Hermann. “I haven’t seen him in a little while.”

“Sick,” Hermann said shortly.

“What are you looking for, sir?” the clerk said.

“I—need to look at some files,” Hermann said lamely.

“Which ones?” barked Berkeley. “Excuse him,” he said to the clerk. “I don't expect they see many women down there.”

Hermann stifled an undiplomatic urge to step on the man’s foot.

“I’d like to look them up myself. Is that possible?” Hermann said.

“Sorry, sir,” she said. “The filing system is too complex. There are too many files, updating all the time. I’ve got to fetch the records for you.”

Hermann nodded, heart sinking.

“Would you like me to step out?” Berkeley said, in a voice that invited a ‘No, that’s quite all right.’

“Yes, if you don’t mind,” Hermann said abruptly. “This is a sensitive inquiry.”

Berkeley made a face. “Oh, well, if it’s a _sensitive_ inquiry, then I _suppose_ I’d better leave you two alone… Miss. Dr. Gottlieb.”

Hermann stood still, frozen with furious humiliation, until he heard the door close.

The clerk looked at him apologetically. If she was looking for commiseration, she was disappointed. Hermann intended to act like nothing had happened. Without looking at her, he said, “I need the twotime transmission from July, 1971, please."

“Certainly sir,” she said mechanically. Hermann watched in agony as she wrote it down on a slip of paper, and then disappeared into the stacks.

He waited for several minutes. Just as Hermann heard her hurried step, he saw a woman pass by the window into the hall. It was Stella McLuhan.

He turned quickly back to the counter. The clerk was back. Her hands were empty.

“Sorry sir, it appears we didn’t get a 2TP transmission that month,” she said.

“There’s nothing?” Hermann said in surprise.

“You’re certain it was July?”

“Quite—” Hermann stopped himself. “No, perhaps I’m mistaken,” he amended. “I’ll have to double-check. I’ll come back tomorrow. Thank you.”

“Of course,” she said.

Hermann exited into the coding bay. This was the department with the most manpower in Century; it took up several floors. But manpower was the wrong word, for the majority of the decoding clerks were women. Each bay covered a different region of the world.

As he waited for the lift, he looked across the hall to the other set of glass doors: _Decoding. Eurasia._ That meant Russia. It should have read “deciphering.” That was one of Hermann’s pet peeves.

Today the files had disappointed him. It felt like someone was sneaking ahead of him, clearing signs from the path—unsnapping twigs and sweeping dirt over footprints. Would the clerk destroy that slip of paper? He hated knowing that he was leaving traceable tracks.

Through the glass into the Russia bay, he could see a few women still at work. If he wasn’t mistaken, this was Stella’s section.

Hermann closed his eyes and sighed. File-spelunking was getting him nowhere. He had to ask somebody—he had no other choice.

“Miss McLuhan?”

Stella looked up from her desk in her small office at the front of the Russia bay.

“Hermann!” she said, in her surprisingly high voice. She stood and crossed the room to clasp his hand with both of hers. “What a wonderful surprise. Oh dear, it’s been so long—so long. How long has it been?”

“I don’t know,” Hermann said, trying to smile. Stella McLuhan was a small woman on the later side of middle age, with quick brown eyes and beautiful dark hair. She wore it up, in an old-fashioned style, which made her look older and more matronly than she actually was. Back in the ‘40s, just after the war, she’d answered an oblique job posting for girls who were “good with numbers” and who “enjoyed puzzles.” She was a natural. A few years later, when Hermann was training at GCHQ, she’d been one of his instructors—the only female instructor, at the time.

“I was hoping we could talk,” Hermann said, unsure how to put the question. “Are you busy?”

“Talk? Is something wrong?”

“Not urgent,” Hermann lied. “Can I walk you out?”

She took his meaning. “Certainly,” she said. “I was just, I was just leaving. Let me get my things.”

*

“Oh—it’s Bernard you wanted to talk about? My, you should have said so.”

They were sitting in a café, in a corner booth. She sat up a little straighter, and patted the side of her hair with the air of a press secretary. She fixed her bright eyes on him—brighter, now, in self-defense. Birch’s disgrace had harmed her by association.

“What were his particular interests?” Hermann asked as two coffees were set down in front of them. “He studied physics before he joined the service, is that right?”

“Yes, oh yes,” said Stella. “Particle physics. He missed it. He was always keeping up with the research, reading all the new developments, telling me all about them. All the public ones, anyway. He was a little... superstitious about the work the government was doing in that field.”

“What government? Our government?”

Stella nodded. “Ours, theirs, the States. All that. I think it was the work he would have really liked to do, physics, but maybe it would have been too much for his nerves. They got worse the older he got. His nerves did. He wasn’t always like that, you know. Not when we met.”

“At GCHQ?”

“That’s right,” she replied. “Class of ‘47. Most of the others in training were men, of course, so they either paid me far too much attention or none at all. Bernard was odd, you know, so he talked to me. At me, is more like it. I don’t think he really noticed that I was a girl at first—he only noticed that I wasn’t telling him to piss off.” She laughed. “After we completed the course, I stayed on to teach, and he got assigned to military intel. I think he was in the radar area, though he couldn’t tell me, of course. But we always stayed in touch. Letters, dinner, you know, whenever he was in town. He proposed to me once, you know, after too much wine, but I told him not to be silly.”

Hermann smiled. He had forgotten how much he liked Miss McLuhan.

“Bernard was in MI for, oh, seven years. Nearly. He got transferred back to us in ‘62. I was working at Century by then, you know, managing the girls in the coding bay.” A lock of hair swung free from behind her ear, and she re-pinned it as she continued. “It transpired that the event that had made him finally impossible to work with was the Cuban Missile Crisis. He had become obsessed with the idea of these secret Soviet missile bases. His bosses finally had enough.”

Hermann frowned and nodded. “It’s strange how an idea can take hold like that,” he said.

Stella nodded, looking at the window behind Hermann’s head. “Yes, yes. Very strange. Bernard was always that type. The one, great discovery. He wasn’t meant for this business, I think, Dr. Gottlieb. He should have stayed in physics. At a university. Not for the government. But he couldn’t resist it.”

Over the next few years, working together in London, she had watched his paranoia grow in secret. He had talked less of scientific papers, and more particularly of Soviet nuclear studies. He had done everything he could to get his hands on their research intercepts, even those that didn’t come through their coding bay.

“Then he was dispatched to Austria. I didn’t think it was a good idea, you know, sending him into the field,” she said. “He wasn’t exactly a spring chicken. But he was excited. I think he wanted to get closer.”

“Closer?” said Hermann.

“He thought there were secret bases in Austria.” Stella’s voice became oddly sharp. “I mean. I don’t know what idea he had in his head—to find one in the forest and sneak in? One little man with no field training? I have no idea what he was thinking. I really don’t.”

Hermann looked away, abashed by her flare of anger.

“Well, he got what he wanted,” she said. “Because the next time he visited home, he told me he had met someone.”

“Someone?”

“Someone from the other side,” she said. “An informant. I should never have believed him. But he was so certain—so certain.”

“I don’t understand,” Hermann said. “Birch was the informant.”

“It was a trade.” She rubbed her eyes. “He had a contact. Someone with information about the GDR’s nuclear missile project. They were sharing it with him—in exchange for information of his own. That was the catch. Of course that’s not how he explained it to me, and I was stupid not to see it.”

“So you believe he was tricked?” said Hermann.

“Tricked? Yes, of course,” she said, dropping her hand from her face. “Of course he was tricked. He was desperate for information—so they manipulated him. They fed it to him, while pumping him for information.”

Hermann said nothing, only nodded.

“Then, last year, in the spring, he visited home once more. He told me that his boss—I forget his name, do you need it?”

Hermann shook his head.

“Well, Bernard said the Vienna station was in touch with a nuclear scientist. A defector. He was very anxious that this man come over to our side. He said he was working on a very dangerous project.”

There was a sliver of ice digging into Hermann’s heart. Greenwich. If only Birch had known the truth. Not nuclear missiles—something far less destructive and far more sinister.

“Bernard told me he was going to use his contact to get to him—but that was insanity, of course, all just—”

Hermann looked up quickly. Without warning, her voice had fragmented. Her mouth was trembling. “And that—that was the last time I saw Bernard.”

She shook her head, squeezing her eyes shut.

Hermann’s heart was in his gut. “When he came back? Did you see him?”

She kept shaking her head. “No, no. They never let me see him.”

Hermann pulled his handkerchief out and wrapped it anxiously around his palm under the table. “But...”

“They wouldn’t even tell me where—where he was—where they were holding him—” Stella rested her elbow on the table and shaded her eyes. “They say he’s—out of his mind, doesn’t know where he is, but—but—”

Sobs shook her shoulders. Hermann handed her the handkerchief. She took it with her free hand but only clenched it in her fist.

“—But I kept thinking—if they would just let me see him, that I could help... And now...”

She pressed the handkerchief to her eyes, and breathed in a great shuddering breath.

“Oh, Hermann, I’m so sorry,” she said, eyes still covered.

“I’m sorry for making you tell me all this.”

She patted his arm, still wiping her face.

“I shouldn’t get so worked up. It was just such a mess, you know.”

“I know.”

Stella sniffed.

“I just don’t understand why,” Hermann said. “Why did he turn?”

“For information,” she said in a light, brittle voice. “I’m sure he didn’t see it as a betrayal—only a transaction. It wouldn’t have been a contradiction to him. He wasn’t a traitor, Hermann. He was misguided. He wasn’t a spy. He was a scientist.”

She drew her hand back.

“But they manipulated him. They used him. And then when he ran away to East Germany, they tortured him.”

Hermann reclaimed his handkerchief while she, frowning, drank some coffee. Her defense of Birch, her faith in him despite it all, was heartbreaking.

“Who found him in Prague?” he said. “The report said he was wandering on somebody’s property. One of our people recognized him in a local newspaper. Do you know who it was?”

“It was Chara,” she said. “The head of the Marathon network.”

“Chara?”

She nodded. There was a short silence.

“Miss—Stella,” Hermann began with difficulty. “If anybody asks whether we’ve spoken…”

She shook her head. “Of course. But Hermann. If you find out where he is, where they’re keeping him, you’ll tell me?”

Hermann nodded. “Yes.”

Stella excused herself. When she reappeared, face pale and eyes scrubbed, Hermann had already paid the bill. He walked her to her bus, trying to formulate his last question.

“In the... decoding bay, who is it that deciphers the 2TP matches, generally?”

“Oh, that’s by region,” she said. “Most of them come in through Eastern Europe, I think.”

“Is there one particular clerk who takes care of them?”

“They’re rare these days, aren’t they?” Stella said. “Oh, there’s my bus. No, no one in particular. At least, not in my section. They may run it differently in E.E.”

“Right,” said Hermann, heart sinking. He watched her bus go, then trudged to a phone booth.

He had no idea where to look for the 2TP. Every route was a dead end. The day felt like a failure.

He called several downtown hotels in the directory and asked their availability. Finally, he found one—large, corporate—with two single rooms available for the night. He booked the rooms.

Through the glass, he watched the front doors of a ballet school open across the street. Kids in their early twenties spilled onto the sidewalk, over-bundled in the spring air, bags slung over their shoulders. Two were linking arms; one boy spun a twirl, making his classmates laugh. Hermann thought about the world of spies through which his colleagues travelled. The web of dark alleys, seedy bars, the clubs, brothels, libraries, offices, airports, where spies exchanged their covert goods on the market of information. The journalists collecting disinformation, the soldiers stealing blueprints, the diplomats sleeping with other diplomats’ wives. That was the world of Rennie and Bowen and Victor’s golden years, the world Becket and Berkeley had inherited. It was not his world. The support staff—himself, Newton, Stella, Wesley; Mrs. Marsden; Caitlin, long ago; Birch, until a few months ago; Rennie’s long-dead cipher clerk, whose name Hermann had forgotten—they stood like the telephone wires on which those important people sent their vital messages; they were the poles, they were the catenaries. The spies came and went, but they were fixed: inflexible, under-repaired, overlooked.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next chapter will be posted Friday, October 18th.


	11. Signal Match

**11\. Signal Match**

Tuesday, June 5th

13:00 GMT

NEWT WAS TIRED. Tired of flipping between BBC 1 and BBC 2. Tired of this carpet. Tired of this headache. Tired of the vague dizziness, the distant ringing. It was louder today. Most of all he was tired of having nothing to do.

He heard footsteps in the hall and looked up. They stopped right outside his door. Cursing, Newt scrambled up, made unsteadily for the closet, and dove inside. He wedged himself into the dark back corner, head spinning. He listened hard, panting, hand cupped around his good ear. Then the footsteps shuffled onward. He heard a squeaky wheel.

It was the housekeeper.

He slumped back against the scratchy spare blankets. False alarm. Of course. Housekeeper. _Obviously_.

He closed his eyes. The ringing vibrated in his ear canal.

 _How did you get here?_ he asked himself.

 _You acted stupid, and now you’re acting stupider,_ answered the voice in his head.

 _Yeah,_ he thought. _Sounds about right._

Why had he done it? At the time, it had simply seemed the thing to do—the natural next step in the transmitter investigation. He wasn’t sure he regretted it, still, but a new dread was growing as he confronted a consequence not previously considered.

Treason was one thing. But he was starting to consider that this incident might have been bona fide professional suicide.

If Hermann couldn’t prove he was being framed—which was tough, when he was 100% guilty—he was, at the least, probably going to lose his job.

And why? What for? Why throw a stick of dynamite into the works of a 20-year engineering career? He thought of Langley.

Newt took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose, closing his eyes. Solitary confinement was going to drive him crazy.

He crawled out of the closet and got back on his feet. He rubbed his rug-burned hands together, then made his way to the phone. He dialed Caitlin Lightcap’s work number.

The phone stopped mid-ring and a voice said “Lightcap.”

“Yello.”

“Hey kid,” she said, voice warming. “How’ve you been?”

Newt flopped back on the bedspread and looked up at the ceiling. “Oh, me? Never mind about me. How are you, chum?”

“Just peachy, pal,” she said.

“Tell me about your day.”

“Same old,” she said, and he heard the sound of a hole punch. “We still on for tonight?”

“Tonight?” He groaned. “Oh, shit. It’s Tuesday.”

“You forget what day of the week it is?”

Newt was rubbing his eyes frustratedly. “No—yes—God—dammit.”

They had practice tonight. He forgotten completely. And he couldn’t go, because he was in hotel prison. Newt hated letting the girls down—especially Caitlin. The band was one of the few bright spots in her life.

He heard her sigh angrily on the other end. “Well, yes. The rumors are true. It is Tuesday. And we have practice.”

Newt said nothing.

“Right?”

“Right...”

“Look, man, if you’re cancelling on us, just say so.”

“No, no—” Newt winced, feeling the full weight of his obligation to her. “Yeah, I’m really, really sorry, but I won’t be able to make it...”

There was a long silence on the line. Newt’s dread grew with every second.

“Man—I’m sorry,” he said, overwhelmed with the feeling that he let everyone down, without fail. “Really, it’s just that some stuff has come up, and I can’t really get out right now... I’m sorry, I’ll make it up to you, I just—”

There was a sound as she stopped sucking her teeth.

“Lightcap?”

“Yeah?”

Her voice was still tense.

“Can you do me a favor?”

“A favor?”

“Can I borrow a guitar?”

“A _guitar_? What’s wrong with yours?”

“For practice.”

“Did your goddamn house burn down? Is that what’s going on?”

“Ha—no. No, I kind of wish, but no, I just need to...”

Some tone in his disappointed laugh tipped her off. Her voice turned on a dime.

“Need to what? I’ll bring it over. The guitar. No problem. Just tell me where.”

He gave the name of the hotel. “Room 237. Just leave it at the reception desk.”

“All right. I will. Should I cancel the gig tomorrow?”

“Maybe,” Newt said sadly. “Well, maybe not. I don’t know. Do you mind singing?”

“If you don’t show up? We’ll manage. Up to you, really.”

Newt chewed his lip.

“I’ll call you.”

“All right.”

“I want to come. I’ll try to come. We should talk.”

“Ominous.”

Newt said nothing.

“I’ll drop the guitar off after work,” she said. “Don’t get any scratches on it.”

“I won’t.”

“And don’t do anything weird with it.”

“Weird? Me?”

“I’ll tell Laurie and Vivian. We’ll see you tomorrow. Or maybe not.”

“Thanks. You’re the best.”

“I know. Take it easy, kid.”

“Bye.”

Caitlin rang off, and Newt listened to the dial tone for another moment before hanging up too.

*

18:30

“Newton, where in God’s name did you get that?”

Newt stopped strumming the guitar. The door to their room closed behind Hermann with an ominous click.

“Good afternoon to you too,” Newt said, not turning as Hermann came in. “Or is it evening? I’ve lost track of the time.”

“I told you _not_ to leave this room,” Hermann said to Newt’s back, as Newt sighed and closed his eyes. He heard no sound of Hermann taking his jacket off or putting his bag down. That meant he wanted a fight. “I know you don’t take threats to your safety seriously, but _I_ do, and if _you_ don’t—”

“Hermann! I didn’t leave the goddamn room, all right?” Newt said, setting the guitar down with a hollow twang. “I had it delivered. Will you settle down?”

“Delivered by whom?”

“Caitlin! She brought it over, left it at the desk, and then someone brought it up to the room. I’ve been in here. All day. Nobody has laid eyes on my precious face. How exactly do you plan on moving hotels? Will we be traveling in secret tunnels, Dr. Gottlieb?”

Hermann closed his eyes and sighed through his nose, dropping his briefcase onto the carpet. “Yes. We’re going. I’ve booked the rooms. Collect your things. I’ll call a cab.”

He went into the bathroom and shut the door. Newt heard the tap turn on.

“It’s boring as shit being in hiding, you know that, Hermann?” Newt said to the closed door. “And you know, I was actually looking forward to finally _talking_ to someone, after being by myself all day. And instead what I get is _scolded_. I had absolutely nothing to do until—”

The door reopened.

“The walls here are extremely thin,” said Hermann with condescending evenness. “I could hear you playing from the lift. I suggest you quiet down.”

Newt sighed frustratedly and stood up. He put the guitar into its hard-backed case and shut it with excessive force. He dropped his arms to his sides.

“There. Packed.”

Hermann spared him a glance, infuriatingly blank, and went to the phone to call down to the concierge for a taxi. Newt stalked into the bathroom and retrieved their toothbrushes.

A short, silent cab ride brought them to their new temporary home, a tall, bland hotel with a prefabricated lobby full of hideously colored mid-century seating. The rooms themselves were less offensive, carpeted and upholstered in various shades of gunmetal gray. They had a connected pair of rooms, better appointed than the single room they’d left: each had a full-size bed, a sofa, a television, a radio, an A/C unit, a desk with an anglepoise lamp, and wide windows overlooking the busy street. It was a clear, cool day; the sun had sunk behind buildings already, leaving an empty blue sky.

Newt could tell that Hermann’s investigations today had gone poorly, but Hermann refused to explain anything until Newt had searched the new room for listening devices. While he did so, Hermann unpacked the sparse luggage he had bought—a few changes of clothes, razors, soap.

“All clear?” Hermann asked when Newt returned from the adjoining room.

“Yeah,” Newt said. He frowned at the clothes Hermann had bought for him, still packed into the bag on his bed. Did Hermann want him take his things into the other bedroom?

“What? You disapprove of my choices?”

“No,” said Newt, unsure if a fight was coming, and ambivalent about starting one. “I mean, probably. But—you had time to pick all _this_ up, but not to go to the bank and get my transmitter?”

Hermann stubbornly avoided Newt’s eyes. “This was more important,” he said.

Newt sighed.

“Do you want me to take my stuff into the other room and sleep there?”

“What?”

Newt frowned at Hermann.

“No—I only booked two for—appearances. Of course not.”

Mollified, Newt nodded. Hermann felt a stab of guilt for giving Newt such a cold shoulder. Hermann sat down at the desk, leaning his cane against it, and looked at the couch. Newt sat down on it.

“I think Victor is right,” Hermann said. “I think there’s a mole in the Division.”

Hermann told him what he’d learned—or, for the most part, not learned—in the office that day.

“So you think someone scrubbed Birch’s file, and the 2TP,” Newt said. “The same person.”

“Yes,” said Hermann.

“A mole.”

“Yes.”

“It could be institutional,” Newt pointed out. “Birch was a scandal. All that was patched up. This file could just be another patch.”

Hermann shook his head. “He knew about Greenwich. What Stella said—”

“Yeah, yeah. I guess.”

“And what about the 2TP? What reason would the fifth floor have to hide that?”

“The Greenwich connection?” Newt suggested.

Hermann shook his head. “There’s something else in that message.”

Newt was still frowning, unconvinced.

“How are you feeling?” Hermann asked into the silence. “How’s your ear?”

“Ear? It’s all right,” Newt lied. The ringing was worse, but it was nothing to worry about. He didn’t want to set Hermann’s alarm bells off.

“Are you still dizzy?”

“Off and on.”

“Is it worse?”

“About the same,” Newt said with persistent optimism.

Hermann frowned and looked away out the window, at the high-rise across the street. Its many windows were reflecting the setting sun. Newt slouched back, wrapping his arms around his knees.

“I want to know who the Abteilung’s new British source is,” Hermann said, half to himself. “Who sold them the transmitter. I wanted that 2TP message. I wanted to decipher it.”

Newt glanced at him.

“What about asking me?”

Hermann looked at Newt. “Asking you what?”

“For the transmission.”

Hermann stared at him.

Newt raised his eyebrows.

“Do you _remember_ it?” Hermann said in shock.

“ _Yes,_ ” said Newt, as if Hermann were the densest person he’d ever met. “Obviously!”

“And when exactly were you planning on _telling_ me—?”

“Oh my god, Hermann, just give me the notepad.” He stood up, and tugged Hermann’s arm. Hermann surrendered the desk chair. “Of course I remember it. Hello? Human Xerox? How can you forget this so often, Hermann, God. You don’t even care about my stupendous brain. You only love me for my body.”

Hermann watched in amazement as Newt closed his eyes and began to scribble letters in groups of five onto the notepad, his hand moving feverishly.

“The groups don’t actually...”

“Shut up.”

“...matter,” Hermann finished. “And did you see the matched transmission as well?”

“Yes, yes,” said Newt, tearing a page off and continuing on the next. “It was September 1950.”

Hermann watched him fill a third and then a fourth page.

“Done,” said Newt. “And the match...” He began transcribing the matching message.

“Newton,” said Hermann. “Are you in the habit of memorizing all the OTP transmissions that the Blueberry processes?”

“Everyone’s got a hobby,” Newt said, still writing. “No—I mean, yes. Only the matches. I usually take a look.”

“Why on Earth?”

“Are you seriously complaining about it right now?”

Hermann opened his mouth to retort. Again it occurred to him how much sensitive information was stored inside of Newton’s head.

A few minutes later, Newt tore the last page off triumphantly. He put both sets together and handed them up to Hermann. “Done,” he said. “Can you do anything with these? Or do you need to take them to your buddy Stella?”

Hermann looked offended. “I may be a _bit_ rusty, but I can still handle a matched set of _Vignère_ ciphers, I should think.”

“They’re OTP, Hermann. There’s no key.”

“Yes, there is. It’s just long. But when you have two messages, it isn’t hard. It just takes a bit of time.”

“Fine, then, if you’re so smart.” Newt stood up to offer the chair, then grabbed the edge of the desk. “Ugh—too fast.”

Hermann steadied his arm. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” Newt said, opening his eyes. “I’m fine. Sit. Decode.”

Hermann sat. “Decipher,” he corrected, putting on his glasses.

Newt rolled his eyes and sat back on the couch. Hermann leaned intently over the messages. “And the first message—do you remember where it came from?”

“Hamburg. Embassy message, I think.”

“Lucky,” Hermann muttered. So both messages were in German. He squinted, then took off his glasses and cleaned them with his tie. It had been a while since he’d done an OTP by hand. He put his glasses back on and started writing out a Vignère Square.

In the long, underhanded history of cryptography, an uncrackable cipher is the holy grail. A cipher that can only be read by the sender and the recipient. The onetime pad system is, in a vacuum, that cipher. It cannot be deciphered.

The OTP is descended from the Vignère Cipher, a fairly secure form of enciphering. The cipher is created using a Vignère Square, a grid of 26 alphabets resembling a multiplication or addition table. The first alphabet starts with A (A=a, B=b, C=c... Z=z), the second with B, (B=a, C=b, D=c... A=z) and so on, until Z (Z=a, A=b, B=c...Y=z).

 

Each letter of the message is encoded according to a ‘key,’ a prearranged word. Each letter of this key corresponds to a line in the Vignère Square. So, in an enciphered message, the first letter of the message corresponds to the first letter of the keyword: if the keyword is, say, “NEWTON,” the sender encodes the first letter according the “N” alphabet, the second in the “E” alphabet, and so on, repeating the keyword as many times as necessary.

 

Because each letter is encoded from a different alphabet, the cipher is extremely difficult to decrypt. But not impossible. The repetition of the keyword is what makes it vulnerable. A clever cryptanalyst can discover the length of the keyword and then analyze the frequency of letters in the message to unravel it.

The onetime pad solves the key problem: instead of a repeating key, the message is encoded using a key the same length as the message. And the key is a random set of letters. This random set of letters is distributed on a pad of paper to _only_ two people. They can then exchange completely secure messages, _only_ to one another, _only_ using each key once. Each letter is encoded on a random line of the Vignère Square, and the intercepter is never the wiser. It is genuinely unbreakable.

Unless the same key is used more than once.

Perhaps perfect cryptographical methods exist, but perfect organizations do not. The Razvedka’s accidental duplicate set of keypads made their messages vulnerable to attack. It was this weakness that Newt and Hermann’s Blueberry computer exploited. But Hermann didn’t need a computer to help him decipher two matched messages. All he needed was a Vignère Square.

Hermann was familiarizing himself with the two messages, planning his strategy. Now they were just a patternless set of letters. But soon, he would pry them apart.

He started with a crib. A crib is a word the analyst assumes to be present in the ciphertext—usually a common word, like “the,” or a name, or a day of the week.

Hermann knew that this message was in German, and he knew when it was sent, so it probably contained the word _Juli_ (July). The first letter of the ciphertext was “N.” Assuming that this represented “J,” he reverse-Vignèred the letter and found that it corresponded to the “E” alphabet. He repeated this with the next three letters, acting as though they spelled out “JULI.” Then he turned his attention to the first message. The two messages shared a random key; assuming that his crib was correct, then he knew the first four alphabets in that key. So he tried the first four letters of the ciphertext according to his key. They revealed “BZKD.” Probably not correct. He started over. Assume that “Juli” starts at the _second_ letter... 

Newt lay on the couch, staring at nothing, listening to the scratching of Hermann’s pen. After a few moments he heard another crossing-out, and heard Hermann sigh to himself. He turned to look up. He was staring at the messages with blank focus Newt recognized. He saw a less intense rendition of it every Sunday over the crossword. It was the total focus of the puzzlemaster. The hotel would have to catch fire or collapse before Hermann took notice.

So Newt got up and took the guitar into the other room to practice. As he was closing the door between their rooms, Hermann said:

“You can leave it open.”

Newt paused.

“The door?”

“Yes. If you’re going to play.”

Newt smiled. “Sure.”

*

An hour or so later, Newt was hungry. He didn’t hear anything from the other room, so he set the guitar down, took the notepad from his desk, and checked on Hermann.

His partner was standing in front of the window, stretching. The desk was entirely covered in papers.

“Hey,” said Newt, approaching with the notepad. “Thought you might need a spare.”

“Thank you. I will soon.” Hermann set it on the desk. “I was just taking a break.”

“It looks like it’s going well,” Newt said. “Did you find a crib?”

Hermann nodded. “I have the first few words.”

“Impressive.”

Hermann shrugged modestly, leaning back against the edge of the desk. He began to loosen his tie.

“It’s nothing too complex, once you get going.”

Newt smiled wryly. “Right. Nothing _too_ complex.”

Hermann returned his version of a smile, eyes flicking down. “I’ll have it all by morning,” he said.

“But you’re taking a break?” Newt said, moving a little closer. “Right?”

“That’s right.”

“May I?”

Hermann dropped his hands to let Newt take over tie-untying duties.

“You’re too kind.”

“The pleasure’s all mine, Dr. Gottlieb,” said Newt, unbuttoning his collar and pulling the tie free. He tossed it aside with a flourish that made Hermann laugh. Then he slid his hands under Hermann’s jacket, around his waist, and kissed him.

Newt pushed Hermann back so he sat on the desk. Hermann made some noises of objection as several papers slid off, but Newt kept him quiet. He pushed Hermann’s jacket off and threw it aside onto the couch.

Hermann leaned back for a second of air. Newt secured his position between Hermann’s knees and started playing with the straps of his suspenders.

“You know it’s 1973, right? Not 1913?” he said as Hermann took his glasses off, chain and all, and set them on the desk.

“Braces are more secure,” Hermann said primly.

“I’ll show _you_ secure,” Newt said under his chin, pushing the suspenders back off his shoulders. Hermann exhaled.

“Darling—please, watch the papers.”

“What could be sexier than a little national security risk?” Newt said, while Hermann ran his hands through Newt’s hair.

“Many—things,” managed Hermann, distracted.

“Mm,” Newt said into his ear, and nipped it.

“Newton...” Hermann said a few minutes and a few buttons later. “I’m not—excuse me—I am not having sex with you on this desk.”

“What?” Newt pulled back. “You’re no fun.”

“You’re an idiot,” said Hermann, too breathless to sound believably annoyed. He gave him a light push on the sternum. “I have work to do.”

Newt scoffed, and kissed him again before letting go. “I’m starving. Maybe human computers don’t need to eat, but engineers do. I’m going downstairs.”

“To the restaurant?” Hermann said, looking up anxiously from his shirt buttons.

“Yes,” said Newt, taking over buttoning. “It’s fine. It’s late. It’ll be empty. And you should eat too.”

Hermann had been successfully put at ease; he acquiesced. They ate in the hotel restaurant. A few solo businessmen were scattered among the tables, eating or drinking alone, and there was one family—two parents with their college-age child, looking uncomfortable on the verge of adulthood. Newt made charming chatter with the lone waiter. They stuck out like a sore thumb, Hermann knew: they looked incongruous together, uncategorizable as a pair. They would have been safer at odds, or separated. But their familiarity was, by now, impossible to hide.

Hermann watched Newt telling the waiter that, yes, in fact, astronauts could one day grow crops on the moon, and would. Somehow in the prefabricated restaurant with its white tablecloths and chintzy carpet, the mass-production with the gaudy veneer of class, the space felt too unreal for anything to befall them.

“So, okay. All right,” Newt said, sitting back. He took off his glasses, rubbed his face, ran a hand through his already disorderly hair, and put his palms together. Eyes closed, he said. “So. 1963, UFO crashes.”

Newt opened his eyes, reached across the table, and dragged Hermann’s abandoned plate over. He picked up his untouched bread roll.

“UFO. Crashes in Germany.” He dropped the roll onto the plate. “Abteilung takes it to Wagner. It contains _some form_ of valuable technology. They extract it, do science all over it. Make it a workable input-output. Becket breaks in, steals one part.”

He tore the bun in half and held one half up.

“The transmitter,” Hermann said.

“The transmitter. You go to pick it up. It’s gone. _Someone_ has stolen it, hidden it somewhere.” He tucked the ‘transmitter’ half under the rim of the plate. “Transmitter is now MIA.

“Bowen disaster breaks. Some unknown time afterwards, we presume, the U.S.A. extracts the output half, the transducer.”

He removed the remaining bread piece from the plate.

“Years go by. The Americans are R&D-ing the transducer. The transmitter is still MIA. Separated, and never the twain shall meet.

“Then in 1971, Abetilung finds someone in Germany. This guy’s got the transmitter. Same guy who originally stashed it? Someone who bought it? We don’t know. He—or she—sends an encoded message, reusing the onetime code pad—”

“Cipher.”

“Cipher, whatever, yes, the cipher pad. We intercept their message, process it in the Blueberry.”

Hermann nodded. “Yes.”

Newt retrieved the first piece of bread and put it back onto the plate. “So. He sells the transmitter to ‘em. Soviets finally get it back. Then the Raz call in Tovarish Greenwich. They renew their studies with vigor. Then Greenwich gets cold feet, calls up Becket. Shares his research with the Brits.”

Newt squished the bread up and held it in his right hand.

“Meanwhile,” he said, placing the excluded half back onto the plate, “the U.S.A. brings their completed transducer over to the U.K. to complete the set, but then some shmuck steals it and gets it stuck in his ear.”

He picked that piece up too, and held it in his left hand.

Both hands out, he looked up at Hermann expectantly. Hermann nodded.

“All correct.”

“So what _is_ it, Hermann? What is it? What does it _do_?”

“I don’t know.”

Newt opened the ‘transmitter’ half in his fist slowly, and, holding them both out, raised his eyebrows insinuatingly at Hermann.

Hermann caught his meaning.

“We will not find out via trial and error inside your skull.”

“Come _on_. We have both components. We’re the first people to have both components in ten _years_.”

Hermann was shaking his head. “Absolutely not. We have no idea what it will do to you.”

“What’s the worst it could do? Kill me? Well do you know what _not knowing_ is doing to me? It’s killing me. I’m dying, Hermann.”

“I’m sure,” said Hermann briskly, sliding his plate back towards himself. “But you’re wrong on one count. We _don’t_ have both components. The transmitter is at the bank.”

“Then get it.”

“And I’m certain the transducer is affecting your hearing,” said Hermann, taking both halves of bread from Newt’s outstretched hands, “because I just said _no._ Twice.”

Newt dropped his hands into his lap with an annoyed sound as Hermann put them back on his plate and sat back.

“Why won’t you let me test the two components? That transmitter is mine. Technically.”

“I don’t approve of self-experimentation,” said Hermann.

“Well sorry about your _principles,_ Hermann,” said Newt, “But this is the best lead we’ve got, and you know it.”

Hermann looked at him. Why did he feel so reluctant to return Newton’s transmitter to him?

Instead of answering, Hermann picked up half of the torn bread and ate it.

“You used to flatter me so much,” Newt said, leaning back in his chair. “Back in Menwith Hill. I miss those days.”

“I’m sure you do,” Hermann said.

“You don’t?”

“Not in the slightest.”

“Remember when you sent me that enciphered message?” Newt said in a reminiscent voice. “Without any explanation? That was a risky move.”

“Why? Because the government was reading my mail? Or because you might not be up to breaking it?”

“It was just a bit of a _move,_ that’s all,” Newt said, grinning.

“You had written that you enjoyed my puzzles. It was simply...”

“Yes, I know what I said!”

Hermann’s cheeks were pink. “Yes, well. When you did decipher it, it was quite tame.”

“I had to go upstairs and get a lesson from the coding bay.”

“I appreciated your commitment to the question.”

“Newt Geiszler: committed to the question til they commit me to the institution.”

Hermann took a sip of his drink, eyes smiling.

“Still, I prefer just doing the crossword together,” said Newt.

Hermann set his glass down. “So do I. It is a great relief to no longer have to scan the Entertainment section of the newspaper to keep up with questions about the Beatles’ membership.”

“Glad to help you purge that knowledge from your mind. It can live in mine forever. By the way, how many of them are there?”

“How many what?”

“Beatles.”

Hermann thought about it. “Between 3 and 6.”

Conversation wandered to linguistics. Twenty minutes later their waiter interrupted a heated discussion about the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis to tell them the restaurant was closing.

“Your bandmate Laurie is a bad influence,” Hermann said as they got into the lift. Laurie, their drummer, was a linguistics professor by day. Once, she had given Newt an informal lesson on syntax trees; Newt’s subsequent attempt to share that knowledge with Hermann had led to such a blow-up that any mention of syntax trees was still banned in Hermann’s apartment.

Newt took Hermann’s arm, closing his eyes as the elevator moved upwards. “Why don’t _you_ show _me_ color terminology that...”

“Yes? That what?”

“Speaking of Laurie,” Newt said, abruptly conversational. “Gig tomorrow.” His eyes were still closed.

The elevator dinged. “That’s a shame,” Hermann said.

“Right. Yeah,” said Newt. “Probably too dangerous.”

“Definitely,” said Hermann, leading him out of the lift and back to their rooms.

*

Hermann turned on the classical station and resumed working. The messages would only reveal themselves through each other: Hermann had to guess each word of one correctly before he could decipher the other. It was like doing a crossword puzzle without any hints.

The A/C unit was climatizing aggressively, so Newt dragged the blanket off the bed and curled up under it on the couch. He was soon asleep. Hermann worked steadily, facing his muted reflection in the wide black glass, vague against the dim city lights. Bach played, Newton snored lightly, and he kept working.

It was well past 2 AM by the time he finished, and Newt was fast asleep. The radio was still playing quietly. But at the slight sound of Hermann setting his pen down, Newt’s snoring cut off.

“You got it?” he said blearily.

He twisted so he could look up. Hermann was rereading what he had deciphered.

“What is this, Gregorian monk music?” Newt mumbled. He stood, unsteady with sleep, and went to look over Hermann’s shoulder. The words were in German and did not resolve immediately to his eye, but he was duly impressed. He kissed Hermann on the temple. “You’re brilliant.”

“Newton.”

Something had emptied out of Hermann’s voice.

“What?”

“The source. In 1971.”

“What? Who was it?”

“The Abteilung picked him up after he woke up from a coma. He says he has the location of the transmitter, but he’ll only tell it to Robert Bowen. And they ask for special radio equipment for him—mono input headphones. Because he’s deaf in one ear.”

Hermann looked up at Newt.

“It’s Charles Rennie. He’s alive.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter 12 will be posted Nov 1st. 
> 
> The code & cipher info in this chapter is courtesy of The Code Book by Simon Singh, which is very excellent.


	12. Long-Term Care

**12\. Long-Term Care**

Wednesday, June 6th 

EMERGING FROM THE LIFT in the basement the next morning, Hermann saw Preston leaving the radio lab. He was halfway down the hall before he noticed Hermann. Preston had a weird, bulky gait. He seemed to heave towards Hermann in the dim hall. As they passed, Hermann nodded to him, but Preston only stared. Any idea of sending a message upstairs with him to his master— _I was wrong. Rennie isn’t dead_ —left Hermann’s mind.

It was raining that morning. Hard and cold and steady like it would never stop. Hermann, living out of a newly bought suitcase, had no raincoat, only an umbrella. In the half-lit lab, he shook it out and set it in the stand, then went into Weeks’s office to give him the update on Orpheus.

No results so far, he reported. They were nearly finished running through all of Victor’s suspects. This update was surely what Preston had come for. Hermann could practically see Weeks’s hand itching to pick up the phone receiver.

“If I may,” said Hermann. “If we return no match, can we attempt to decipher the messages?”

“Decipher them?”

“Yes. Sir.”

“Well,” said Weeks, looking like the question was somehow impertinent. “Well, I thought we had tried that.”

“No. We never tried. The cursory check didn’t identify the cipher. But it was low-priority. Now that it’s high-priority, I could try to decrypt it myself.”

“We can’t send Orpheus up to the coding bay,” Weeks said. “The messages are too sensitive.”

“No sir. Of course not. I can do it.” _Please_ , Hermann thought. _Let me at it_.

“I’m sorry, Hermann, upstairs was very clear about this. They only want traffic analysis. Not decryption. It’s not worth the hours.”

“But sir—”

“No, no, I won’t have you wasting your time on this. It’s probably some nasty little number personally devised by this fellow’s handler. It will take far too long. No, no puzzling.”

Hermann frowned and abruptly stood. “If that’s all.”

Weeks looked surprised. “No, not quite. It’s not. Don’t you want an update on Dr. Geiszler?”

Hermann’s pulse jumped. “What’s happened?”

“Well, nothing. but I thought you would ask.”

Hermann hoped he hadn’t paled, but he feared he had. He should have asked. Damn it all. They knew. They knew everything.

“That’s what old Preston was down telling me. No news. But I’ll keep you updated, all right, Hermann?”

“I didn’t think it was my—business,” Hermann managed.

“Nonsense,” said Weeks, opening his drawer. “Of course I’ll tell you what they tell me. It’s our lab, after all.” He fished out his bag of tobacco. “Victor expects your report tomorrow. You’d better hurry.”

His heart rate still slowing back to normal, Hermann returned to his desk. Why wouldn’t they let him decipher the messages, for God’s sake? _Just traffic analysis._ What bloody stupid orders. He glared around the empty lab, wishing he had stayed at Cambridge and devoted his life to number theory. Well, there was still time. Yes. He would find Birch, and together they would run back to academia, where they belonged.

The lab was quiet this early in the morning. Most of the lights were still off. Hermann sat in the dim silence. He needed coffee. He’d slept very poorly, and little. He kept waking from dreams about fire, shivering in the hotel bed. Newton, curled next to him, radiated warmth, but Hermann only pulled the blanket more tightly around himself, loath to touch, or even to get up and turn off the A/C.

"So now we know who set it all in motion," Newt had said, late last night, when the rain was starting.

Hermann had nodded vacantly.

“And now we know who stole the transducer, back in ‘63,” Newt added. “When he woke up from his coma, he ran right back to the Abteilung to sell it.”

“Unless they captured him.”

“Rennie was _working_ for them, Hermann. He was a double agent, just like Bowen.”

 _Just like I could have been,_ Hermann had thought.

“As soon as he woke up, he called his buddy Bowen and got a sweet deal for his stolen gadget,” Newt had said.

“The language in the message is ambiguous,” Hermann had said.

“Why are you still looking for excuses for him?” Newt had said with unusual directness.

Hermann had said nothing, staring vacantly out the dark glass. “No. I’m not. You’re probably right.”

“Hey, at least he’s alive,” Newt had said. “He didn’t die for you after all.”

Hermann had nodded again, not listening.

He sat, listening to the pipes running quietly and equipment humming. Wesley had been right: the lab was quiet without Newton’s presence. No noisy machinery from behind his door, no pirate radio. Hermann stared at his office door on the other side of the lab, feeling a dull sadness.

As he stared, he noticed the light was on. A shadow passed behind the door.

Somebody was inside.

Hermann stood slowly, taking his cane, and crossed the lab as quietly as he could. He paused outside the door and listened. They were moving things around. Papers. Drawers.

Like they were looking for something.

Hermann wrenched the door open. A cry came from within.

“Oh!”

“Is—Wesley?”

“Oh, Hermann, how you startled me. I was just, I,” Wesley blustered, stepping back from Newton’s desk, like it was a bomb whose fuse he’d just lit. “I—”

“Dr. Wesley!” said Hermann sharply. “What in God’s name are you doing in here?”

“I was just—looking for something.” Wesley backed up into a shelf and upset a stack of files, sending them cascading to the floor.

“Best of luck,” Hermann snapped, trying hard to keep his voice down. The mess was catastrophic in Dr. Geiszler’s tiny office, everywhere except the workbench. That was cleared, all tools neatly arranged or put away in boxes. Everywhere else—the desk, the shelves, the chairs—was an unmanageable ocean of files. “ _What_ exactly were you looking for?”

“A file.”

Hermann’s control on his volume failed as he barked, “ _What_ file?”

“Please!” Wesley put his hands up in front of him— “Please, you don’t need to shout.”

“Tell me,” Hermann hissed, “why I shouldn’t call Weeks in here, right now, Dr. Wesley. This is a _major_ breach of protocol.”

“It’s a confidential situation,” said Wesley, glancing furtively at the door behind Hermann.

“In this building, most things are!”

Wesley gestured. “Please! Hermann, I can explain, if you just listen.”

Hermann unclenched his free hand grudgingly and pointed at the side door, which led out into the hall. “Out,” he said.

In the hall, Hermann shut the door behind them and rounded on Wesley.

“Would you please explain,” Hermann began in a furious undertone, but Wesley unexpectedly grabbed him by the shoulder.

“Hermann—” His voice was distraught. “I’m terribly worried about Newt, I think he’s in real trouble—”

To Hermann’s horror, he heard his labmate choke back a sob.

“I didn’t think anything of it, at the time, but now he’s missing, and I’ve been—been so—”

Hermann, leaning instinctively away, patted Wesley awkwardly on the hand. “Wesley, please, it’s all right. I’m sure Newton is all right.”

“No, no,” said Wesley miserably, covering his eyes, “And it’s my fault, I didn’t stop it...”

“What are you talking about?”

“Leak check,” Wesley said. He dropped his hands and looked up at Hermann. “They asked for my help, checking Newt.”

A leak check was a test done when there was a suspected security breach. A set of copies were made of the same tempting file, with minor differences in each—differences like punctuation or extra spaces. Each file was distributed as normal among the suspects. Then, if one version was leaked, it could be traced to the person who had leaked it.

“A leak check? Who did? When?”

“A few months ago,” said Wesley. “February. One of the fifth-floor boys came down and asked me to—asked for my help. He just asked the normal procedure, how files are distributed down here, you know.” Wesley sniffed loudly. “I told him we just use our couriers. I mean, anyone could have told him that.”

Alarm bells were going off in Hermann’s head.

“What did he want?”

“He, he wanted to see what... what Dr. Geiszler would do,” Wesley said. “He wanted me to keep an eye on him. When he sent the file through.”

“What file? Did you see it?”

“Yes—as a matter of fact. He gave me a look at it first. It was classified stuff,” Wesley added, standing up a little straighter. “New tech. From the Germans, I think. He told me it was very important.”

“Who did?” demanded Hermann in a low voice. “What was his name?”

“His name was Becket,” Wesley said. “Raleigh Becket. Case officer.”

Hermann opened his mouth, furious, about to shout, but then heard footsteps behind him. He turned and saw one of the IBM techs walking towards them. The tech nodded to both of them. They nodded back.

“Morning,” said Wesley weakly.

The tech walked past. He turned the corner.

“Wes—”

“So I watched him, then,” Wesley said, oblivious. “The morning of. Right in this hallway. Saw the courier deliver it. Heard him come into his office, saw the light come on. Then he came out right away and called the courier back. The kid hadn’t even made it to the lift. Gave him back the file, said it was misdirected.”

Hermann nodded once, not trusting himself to speak.

“So that was that, then. No time for stealing or copying. Newt was secure. No leak.”

“And that’s what you told Becket?”

“Yes,” said Wesley. “But I—” He opened and closed his mouth, looking distraught again. “Well, I _thought_ it was all right. But then this weekend, at the conference, there’s the, well, the _theft_ , and next thing you know, he’s missing. So I got scared that _I_ had been wrong. That I’d made some _mistake_.” He covered his eyes again, voice trembling. “But it’s impossible, of course—I mean, it’s just—”

“Wesley,” Hermann interrupted viciously, “ _None_ of this makes any sense at all. A leak check is not done on just one person. And it is not done on specialists. And it is certainly not done using _actual_ classified material!” He was practically shaking with rage. “Why didn’t you _ask_ any _questions_?”

Wesley was shaking his head.

“Why on Earth would they check Newton without his supervisor’s knowledge?” Hermann continued, voice rising. “And where is Becket in the chain of command? He’s a bloody resident, he’s not fifth floor—did you even think to ask _what_ they suspected him of or what he—”

“Hermann!” cried Wesley, covering his eyes with both hands. “Please, please stop shouting at me!”

Hermann stopped.

The echo died on the acoustic tile.

“This is our lab,” said Wesley, muffled. “You’re supposed to be on _my_ side.”

Hermann, stymied, said nothing.

“I shouldn’t have helped them,” said Wesley. “But I didn’t know.”

“Right. You're right. Sorry.” Hermann’s guilt was rising like an inconvenient cough. He could well imagine it—someone well-dressed from upstairs, coming down here not for Weeks or even Hermann, but to talk to _Wesley._ Whom no one ever talked to. Flattering him by showing him a fancy classified gadget. He never would have said no.

“Did they say why?”

“Why what?”

“Why Newton was under suspicion?”

“No,” said Wesley. “Didn’t think it was my place to ask.”

“How do you know about the theft this weekend?” Hermann asked.

“At the conference?” said Wesley. He shrugged, like it was obvious. “Heard about it, same as you.”

Hermann nodded, to imply that he too had heard from rumor.

“I’m sorry for shouting,” he said, after a pause.

“That’s all right, Hermann.” Wesley glanced at him, then back at the floor. “We really don’t get many visitors down here. Especially not me. It’s hard to know what to say.”

“That’s true,” Hermann said. Wesley was a born specialist; he had no idea how things worked upstairs. Hermann should have known that. Becket had.

“But in any case, it’s completely impossible,” Wesley was saying. He searched Hermann’s face for reassurance. “I mean, I’ve no idea what they’re thinking, upstairs, really.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s impossible. That Newt could be an informant. He never would.”

He was still looking at Hermann for reassurance.

“Right?”

“No,” said Hermann. “No. Of course he wouldn’t.”

*

When they spoke on the phone, Chara understood what Hermann wanted before he had a chance to say it. It was like he had been waiting by the phone for this call for the last twelve months.

“I can take you, Dr. Hermann,” he said. “I can take you to see him.”

“Where?”

“Don’t be worrying,” he said, and it sounded like he was looking around. “He is in clinic. Long-term care. No security.”

He wouldn’t give any more detail, but he told Hermann to meet him at Paddington Station at 3:30 that afternoon.

Lionel Chara, the son of a Frenchwoman and a Czech freedom fighter, had served his first jail sentence at the age of twelve. After a turbulent adolescence, he’d cooled off and found gainful employment on the train lines. It was there that he’d been recruited to one of the Prague networks. In the late 50s, he’d helped with a complex diplomatic document-lifting operation spearheaded by the ubiquitous Charles Rennie. They’d brought Chara to the U.K. for a more robust education and then sent him back to Prague, with encouragements to rekindle his criminal connections. Soon enough he was running his own network of native informants, dubbed the Marathon Network.

Chara had been the valuable, affable runner of a valuable, high-yield network in a dangerous region. The Division had invested time and money in his education, and it had been paying off in dividends. So it had been bizarre, last year, when the Division had unceremoniously sacked him.

Hermann found him, unmistakably hulking, at the lost and found baggage desk in Paddington Station. He said nothing and queued behind him in his shadow. When Chara left, there was a ticket lying on the counter. Hermann covered it with his hand and slipped it into his sleeve.

It was a round-trip ticket to Reading, leaving in ten minutes from Platform Three. _2nd CAR_ was written in tiny print on the back.

*

It was early yet for commuters, and the second car was mostly empty. The train was well out of the station before the door of the car opened and Chara entered, all 6’6” of him. He edged between the two columns of seats towards Hermann. He was out of scale with his surroundings—with interiors of any kind. His black overcoat kept catching on the seats as he passed.

“What you are doing here, Dr. Hermann?” Chara said, sitting down beside him. “How is Dr. Isaac Newton?”

“He’s well,” Hermann said.

“My favorite teacher, at the old Estate,” Chara said. “Not so serious as you Englishmen.”

“Not serious enough, some might say.”

“Ah—no,” Chara said. “My favorite teacher was his friend Miss Lightcap. It’s so long since I see her. She was fired, just like me.” He grinned down at Hermann. “Maybe now she has time to get drink with me.”

Hermann tried, in vain, to smile back. “Lionel,” he said, and gave up the attempt, “What are you doing here? Why are you still in London?”

“They took my passport,” said Chara, looking away out the window, where raindrops were skating backwards on the pane. “After all, they printed it.”

“But—”

“So you are wanting to see Birch. I will take you, Hermann, but I tell now: there is nothing to see. His mind is finished. That part is true. The rest of it, maybe no. But that is true.”

“The rest of what?” said Hermann.

“‘Lured, Kidnapped, Tortured,’” Chara pronounced, quoting the headline that had shortly preceded his sacking. “Lured, I don’t know. Kidnapped, I think so. But he was not only tortured.”

“What happened?”

Chara leaned in.

“I think he was a test subject,” he said.

*

“Never made public, did they, how I found him? I almost missed him, you know. The police found him, he is wandering on farm. Very small town. The farmer’s wife calls them from one of the telephone in town. She has to walk ten miles from her house to use phone. When police arrive, they are expecting a drunk. He is in the hayloft. When they see him, they decide no, not drunk—an imbecile. Or someone escaped from asylum.

“So they lock him up, and his picture is printed in paper. That is when I see it. I always read the papers back to front. It’s my job, right?”

Chara’s heavy eyebrows descended. Outside, the city flew past in fog-choked monochrome.

“I recognized him from the wanted pictures. From Austria office. Deserter. Defector. The police, they have no idea he is foreigner—because he is not speaking, I think. I only have a little time before they figure it out and turn him over to government. So I take the first train out.

“I bail him out with some half-cooked story about how he is my retarded brother. They don’t believe me but I have enough cash, make it plausible. And as we are leaving, one of the cop is asking me: ‘Hey, where did your brother learn English?’

“We leave in hurry. But the cops have seen me. Us. Together. I do not like that. They can give our description to anyone who is asking. And I know that there will be people asking.

“In station, I call the resident at embassy in the Prague. Emergency line. Request for sanctuary, urgent. I cannot let Birch be in public even another hour,” said Chara. “He is complete mess.”

“A mess—how?” Hermann finally interrupted.

Chara looked down at him, then away over his head, back out the window. “He was in worse shape than any defector I ever saw, I’m telling you that. Birch, he said nothing. His eyes were… out of focus. He stared, but did not see. He moved without looking. Horrible moves. Like someone is jerking his puppet strings. And he said no words, but sometimes he made this whine—I think it was not intentional. It just came out of his mouth.

“I think he knew I was there to help him. He listened what I said, he followed my orders. He did not speak—he only told one thing. ‘They made me listen.’ Only words he said. ‘They made me listen.’”

The hoarse whisper in which he repeated it now, in the half-empty commuter car, made Hermann’s blood run cold.

“Listen to what?” Hermann said quietly.

But Chara resumed his story. “After that, he is silent again. We make it to safehouse flat. The Station Head take him. Goes smooth, for such unexpected delivery. I feel proud.”

“Where did they take him?” Hermann asked.

“Back to London,” said Chara. “Then one week later, they are calling me. I’m wanted back at HQ. I’ve never even _been_ to HQ, right?”

Hermann nodded.

“At Century, they ask me all about. A million questions. Like they are preparing me to testify. I thought they were—I thought I am getting ready for something official. An inquiry. Not often you get your man back after he defects, right? But then the next thing I know—they sack me. _I_ am leak, they say. Breaching official secrets act, they say. Lucky they don’t arrest me, they say. They took my passport. Well!” Chara raised both hands and dropped them to his side. “A leak! Me! To the press! Me! I have only been in country for few days. It was already leaked!”

“It wasn’t you?”

“No! Dr. Hermann, of course not!”

“Then who? Do you know?”

“I know who pointed finger at me,” said Chara. He straightened up in his seat, and then slouched forward, coming unexpectedly close to Hermann’s face. “That bastard from Austria Station. Birch’s boss. Becket.”

“ _Becket?_ ”

Chara nodded, and straightened up again. “He had lot of _little_ questions for me. I didn’t like him. His little questions. His expensive suit.”

He turned and spat onto the floor. Hermann raised his eyebrows in disgust.

“Hermann, ten to one he got me fired. If he is leak, that I don’t know.”

“You thought Birch was a test subject,” Hermann said. “A test subject for what?”

“I don’t know,” said Chara. “Something dangerous.”

“Did you tell the fifth floor your theory?”

“Yes. I tell them. But I think they are already knowing about it.”

*

The Reading care home was a low brick building out back of the hospital, shadowed by poorly tended hemlock trees. Up and down their slumping trunks were patches of dead gray limbs, with tiny twigs dense like cobwebs.

Hermann limped quickly down the slick stone walk behind Chara, his umbrella bouncing on his shoulder. Chara had no umbrella, only his ill-fitting overcoat. From the way he walked, Hermann could tell he had visited Birch before. He wondered again why Chara was still in England. Habing no passport made travel difficult, but not impossible for someone of his education and resources.

The attendant asked for them to sign in on a clipboard. One after the other, they dutifully recorded fake names. The attendant led them down a silent hallway to the last room on the right. It was a clean white room with one window. The leaning trees outside gave the light a green cast. There was one bed, and in it lay Dr. Bernard Birch.

He lay half-reclined against several thin pillows, a white wool blanket half hanging off of him. Hermann almost didn’t recognize him for a second—he had far less hair, and no glasses. The rise of his lateral profile, knee, shoulder, chin, cut across the white wall like a mountain ridge. He was profoundly immobile. His expression was vacant.

He made no acknowledgement of their arrival. The attendant shut the door behind them, and Birch’s eyes moved over slightly. Hermann made a small step forward, into his field of vision, and then Chara took a much larger step, placing himself at the foot of Birch’s bed.

“Bernard, old fellow,” Chara said, “How is weather today? You see this rain? That is meaning spring is here. Many people, they are counting on the sun. But rain is what makes things grow in springtime. Especially in this country,” he added with a big smile.

Birch’s eyes moved up slightly, somewhere near the area where Chara stood, but otherwise he gave no sign of seeing the man.

“I brought a friend today,” Chara said, gesturing to Hermann. Hermann budged closer. “You remember Dr. Hermann? From signals? He is specialist just like you.”

He looked quickly at Birch, then Chara, then the bedstead. He’d braced himself for the worst. The worst was not to be found here—drooling, tremors, deranged speech. But the emptiness of his affect was chilling.

“Hello, Dr. Birch,” Hermann said, voice coming out hoarse.

No matter how he tried, he could manage none of the bedside platitudes. For some, like Chara, that normal speech calmed the air. But Hermann could not act the part. He could not speak to the man as if they were making small talk in the elevator, or even as if were in hospital making a routine recovery. As if, by speaking like everything was all right, it would be. For him, that type of lying felt worse than saying nothing at all.

“Dr. Hermann wants to know how are you,” Chara said. “Since our daring escape. Do you remember?”

Birch remained immobile.

“Or your time in East Germany, Bernard,” Chara said, and Hermann looked at him sharply. “Do you remember?”

Hermann looked to Birch, afraid that the mention of his imprisonment or flight would trigger a reaction. But he was unmoved. His face was as empty as ever.

He understood nothing. Hermann could see, his heart sinking, that there was nothing here to learn but what Chara, Stella, and a dozen half-false articles had already told him. Birch had nothing to say.

Later, as they left, Hermann wondered: Was this the price Birch had expected to pay? When he had decided to turn, had he expected to lose this? He was not a double agent in the Robert Bowen tradition, an actor playing both sides for his own pleasure. He had been misguided, greedy for knowledge, unsure of his own principles. Not like Bowen or Rennie, the utterly principle-less. Perhaps he had expected to lose his life, in pursuit of—of whatever he had wanted. But never his mind.

Back at Reading Station, Hermann bought a card, envelope, and a stamp. He, wrote, “Thank you for the flowers,” sealed it into the envelope, addressed it to Stella, and wrote the care home’s address in the top right corner.

*

They were back in London before sundown. Despite massive and now articulated misgivings, Hermann went to the bank. He recovered the little green case from his safe deposit box.

He sat huddled at the end of the crowded train car. Why had Newt been under suspicion? What had Becket wanted with him? What was Becket’s stake in all this? What was it all for? What did the device _do?_

Armed with Birch and Chara’s evidence, he would still do his best to talk Newton out of testing it on himself. He would try to convince him not to. But deep down he knew it would be in vain. And he feared what would happen when, after all this time, they finally brought the two components together.

On the tube, a woman in nursing scrubs was peeling and eating an orange. A man nearby was reading a biography of George Cantor, someone whom Newton considered a personal enemy. On mornings when Newton rode the train to work, instead of his motorbike, he met Hermann at Wheaten Street Station and they commuted downtown together. Hermann was rather surly in the mornings, but Newt was just as talkative as ever. He would stand extremely close to Hermann in the crowded train—the only public place where this would draw no eyes—and prattle on about something or other. Sometimes he used Hermann as a support if he could not reach the bar. Hermann, now sitting alone amid strangers, tried to remember the subjects of discourse last week: the golden age of piracy, a _Star Trek_ episode he disliked, what would happen if the Earth stopped turning?

That had been Thursday morning. Their last commute before he’d left for the conference. Had it been their final commute? Hermann had never had any particular fondness for these mornings, but now the thought of them left him hollow. He had thought it would be this, forever. The same routine, the same home, the same Newton. Had he been wrong? 

And when he opened the door to their hotel suite, calling hello as he took off his shoes, no reply came. All was clean and ordered. The beds were made, Rachmaninov was playing on the radio. Walking in his socks through the two connected rooms, Hermann found them both empty.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter comes with an EXTRA huge thank-you to my editor Sasha, for making Chara’s dialogue compliant with typical Czech-to-English speech errors. Chapter 13, the final chapter of Part 2, will be posted Nov 15th. Fic mixes [here](https://davidfosterwallace2ndgromit.tumblr.com/post/185756646448/).


	13. Transmitter & Transducer

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Surprise! New chapter a week early! This is the final chapter of Part 2.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warning for disassociation/minor panic attack in this chapter.

**13\. Transmitter & Transducer**

WEDNESDAY WAS GOING BADLY.

Hermann had left Newt at 8 AM. After eating breakfast (which he requested, through a closed door, that room service leave in the hall), Newt watched the TV with the sound off and the news playing on the radio. But the ringing. The ringing was louder today.

He turned the radio up, but as soon as his attention drifted from the words he was hearing, it wormed back into his awareness. The ringing, the ringing. Like a mosquito he couldn’t slap.

He turned the volume up on the TV and lay on the carpet, between the bed and the window, with the radio next to his head. Rain hammered the glass. He strummed Caitlin’s guitar for a while, mindlessly running chord progressions, while in his head, his thoughts paced the perimeter inside an electric fence. If he tried to get out—if he stopped playing—he would get shocked.

He closed his eyes and slowly convinced himself of this. _Keep playing, or the alien ray zaps your brain._

Obediently he played another chord.

That was a game he had played since childhood. When Newt closed his eyes, nothing was real except for what was in his head. He could logic himself almost anywhere he liked.

_When I open my eyes, there won’t be anything. It will all have been a dream._

He strummed, feeling the vibration in his chest.

_This is all my imagination. I’m going to open my eyes, and there will be nothing—just a big empty plane, a huge silent airplane hangar, an unformed space cloud._

He let the chord echo into silence.

_None of it’s real. Just me._

A relative lull in the TV coincided with the end of a transition on the radio, and in the slit, it slid in.

The ringing.

He squeezed his eyes shut tighter. _It’s not real. Nothing can touch me in here,_ he thought.

But what if this could?

Newt sat bolt upright and opened his eyes.

This thing was fucking with his brain.

It was feedback, he thought. The ringing. It had to be. Some other signal. Something nearby. He yanked the radio plug out of its socket, then crawled over to the TV and pulled its plug too. He stumbled into the adjoining room and unplugged those too, then dizzily turned all the light switches off.

It was still ringing.

He got frantic. He pulled the bottom off the desk lamp and pulled out the wires, then took out the lightbulb and smashed it. He pulled the back off the TV and searched its guts. He did the same to the other TV and both radios. Nothing. He tore apart the bathrooms, opening the U-pipe under the sink and unscrewing the head of the shower. He used a coin to unscrew every outlet and vent.

Nothing.

Newt was about to step right off the deep end when at the door came a knock.

Lunch.

He ate his sandwich in the empty bathtub with the lights off. The semi-repaired radio played Lou Reed next to his head, reverberating soothingly off the walls and the tub. The calories soothed him too. All was dark except one thread of light from beneath the door.

 _Why did you put that thing into your head?_ he asked himself, properly, for the first time.

This was a problem he sometimes had. The problem that had reared its head on his trip to Langley, nearly two years before. Sometimes things were too good. Sometimes, in the absence of a real problem, he rationalized a net of potentialities and justifications and inventions and then before he knew it, he was trapped inside. And then the only way out was with scissors.

Things were stable now, or had been. He had a stable relationship; Hermann was patient, and Newt had his privacy. He had a stable workplace, focused but out-of-the-way. Conditions could hardly be better.

But Newt was not stable. He did not deserve these things. He deserved—needed—an instability to match the shape of his psyche. Its spikes and drops, its static frantic ground-covering, its chaos pattern tracking, its unpredictable meteorology. He didn’t belong here. He was not in the world he deserved; it was not good enough for him, it could not keep up with him, but at the same time, he didn’t deserve it as it existed: growing, calm, normal, real. He belonged elsewhere.

He would not go down this slope again. If this was where solitary confinement would send him—he would not go.

He was going to clean up, he decided, and get out of here.

Newt was up, he was out, listing left as he smacked on the light and threw open the bathroom door. Light poured in. He turned on the tap and ran it until it was frigid, then plunged his face into it. His glasses went clattering.

When he couldn’t feel his face anymore he came up, ran his hand back through his wet hair. He blinked, tasting salt and iron. He put his glasses back on and found that the foggy reflection in front of him was having a nosebleed.

*

Newt found her in the alley out back, smoking. Caitlin was hugging herself in a long overcoat, rolling a can back and forth between the heel and toe of her high-heeled boot. The generous eaves of the bar were protecting her from the ongoing downpour. Newt, already drenched, ducked through the curtain of water and splashed his way towards her.

She glanced up. “It’s you.” She did a double take. “You all right, Newt?”

“I must look awful if you’re giving me the first-name treatment,” Newt said, putting his hand on a dumpster as he felt the first verging of a dizzy spell. His weather-inappropriate wool coat was already soaked through.

“You do,” Lightcap said. “You look like...” He had his eyes closed, waiting for the ground to stop pitching below him. “Seriously, are you all right?”

He straightened up. “It’s just vertigo.” He blinked. “I’m fine.”

“If you say so,” she said, bending down to bump cheeks hello. “Cigarette?”

Newt was pushing himself up to sit on the wooden crates next to her. “Thanks.”

While he wiped off his glasses, she lit one in her mouth and passed it to him. He only really smoked with Cait. He took one pull and then held it between his fingers, immediately forgetting about it.

“Are Laurie and Vivian here yet?”

Cait shook her head. “I don’t think so.”

“Thanks for the delivery yesterday,” he said. “You really saved my ass.”

“That hotel was seedy as hell, dude,” Caitlin said. “Are you still staying there?”

“No, we moved last night. New place. Downtown. More secure.”

“‘We’? So Dr. Stodg-lieb is slumming with you too?”

Newt snorted at the nickname. “No. I mean, yes, he is. But we moved. To a nicer place.”

Lightcap dropped her cigarette butt and stepped on it. “Why?” she said, lighting another. “What the hell is going on with you two? Are you eloping? Or am I witnessing the early stages of the next big Div scandal?”

“Please. They knew what they were getting into when they hired me.”

Caitlin snorted out smoke from her new cigarette. “I knew you had it in you. Burn it all down on your way out. Come and join me. I’ll get you a job.”

“At IBM? No thanks,” said Newt. “No, I think Hermann’s pretty committed to keeping me gainfully employed.”

Lightcap rolled her eyes. “What for?”

Newt shrugged. “Habit?”

“Loyalty?” she said with a derisive edge.

“Convenience?”

“The ample pay?”

“The friendships.”

“Ha, ha. Tell me what’s going on.”

Newt remembered the cigarette burning down in his hand, and took another pull. “Yeah. Well, nothing. I just semi-accidentally stole some extremely sensitive CIA equipment from the Estate. And now it’s stuck inside my ear, and everyone is looking for it, and also me.”

“Newt, holy shit,” she said.

He retold her the story of his escapades—the transmitter blueprint, the reconstruction, and the semi-accidental theft, followed by the semi-failed real theft. He told her too, as briefly and obliquely as possible, Hermann’s side of it.

“Jesus,” she said when he’d finished. “What a mess.”

“Yeah.”

Newt sat back on the heel of his hand, and breathed in the cold, humid air, the smell of rain and the city and the smoke of Caitlin’s foul American cigarettes. “It’s good to be out,” he said. “I was starting to think the real world no longer existed. Or maybe never had. And that I was just a figment of Hermann’s imagination.”

Caitlin shrugged. “Locking you up is stupid. It’s not like they have any proof.”

“Um, once they apprehend me, they’re gonna find proof right quick. They take one quick look with the otoscope and I’m going to find myself getting extradited.”

“I meant Hermann,” said Caitlin, exhaling smoke. “He shouldn’t lock you up. They don’t have any evidence against you.”

Newt shrugged. “He wants to protect me. How much do you know about neurology?”

“Neurology? Some. Why?”

“Any idea what long-term effects a single nonstop frequency might have on the brain or skull or inner ear?”

“No. Besides insanity.”

“As in clinically?”

“No,” she said, exhaling smoke. “But I’m no expert. Are you hearing something?”

“Yes. Actually, no, not out here with the rain. But when I’m alone and it’s quiet, yes. It’s getting louder every day.”

“Ooh. Maybe it’s a tracking device. And they’re coming closer.”

“Cait, seriously.”

“Seriously, I have no idea. Have you tried taking it out?”

“Yes,” said Newt.

“But have you _really_ tried?”

“Yes.”

Looking skeptical, she pulled her cigarette out of her mouth and threw it down. It made a faint but satisfying hiss when it hit the water.

“So Rennie, huh,” she said.

“Seems like,” said Newt.

“He always was a two-timer.”

“Even in the good old days?”

“Back when he was running with Bowen and Vicky?” she said. “Definitely. Birds of a feather commit treason together.”

Newt snorted. “I guess. Vick being the exception.”

“Someone’s got to get excluded, or it isn’t a club.”

“I s’pose,” Newt said. He frowned. “Wasn’t their heyday before your time?”

“I was recruited younger than you, Shortstack,” she said.

“What? No you weren’t,” said Newt, sitting forward competitively. “I was 21.”

“I was 20.”

“Recruited in uni doesn’t count, you didn’t actually _start_ until you graduated.”

“ _Anyway_ , asshole,” she said, “I’m just telling you. Rennie and Victor were awfully close.”

“I didn’t know you knew them so well."

Cait looked at him, then away at the rain. “Not them,” she said.

Newt frowned. “What do you mean?”

She looked back at him, and paused like she was about to say something. Then she caught sight of someone over Newt’s shoulder.

“Look alive,” she said, turning away quickly. “Your boyfriend’s pissed.”

Newt turned quickly, and saw Hermann splashing furiously down the alley towards them under an umbrella.

“Shit,” he said, throwing his cigarette butt into the puddle with Caitlin’s.

“Newt—if Rennie’s involved in this—if he’s alive, and you two numbskulls figured it out, I find it hard to believe Victor doesn’t know it too,” Cait said in a quick, low voice. “And if he doesn’t, he should know. If I were you, I’d look into it.”

Newt just frowned, hopping down from the crate.

“Afternoon, Doc,” Caitlin said loudly as Hermann reached them. “Come to see the show?”

“I most certainly have not,” Hermann said. “Newton—what are you doing out here?”

“Not smoking,” Newt said immediately.

Hermann, opening his mouth angrily, was derailed by the unexpected reply. “I meant— _out_ here. As in outside.”

“It’s a beautiful day, Dr. Gottlieb,” Caitlin said over the sound of the rain. “Can’t a girl smoke outside with some company?”

“Miss Li—Caitlin,” Hermann said. “If you don’t mind. Newton and I must be going.”

“We’re onstage in an hour,” Lightcap said. “So hurry back.”

Hermann raised his umbrella and met her hard look.

There arose in the air the same tension that always rose when Hermann and Caitlin met face-to-face. He was disconcerted by her, by the dangerous edge she articulated in his partner. Caitlin disliked him for all the conventional reasons—rigid, unfunny, interested in boring things, never came to Newt’s gigs, seemed (to her) to exercise an excessive control on Newt’s free will. In truth, this discomfort with his influence was that of someone uncomfortable with the surrender that a relationship demands. In her view, she and Newt were still in the same foxhole, fighting together, and would die before surrender. But the truth, which neither of them really realized, was that Newt had surrendered long ago, and only hunkered down to visit her.

“We’ve got to go,” Hermann said. “Another engagement.”

“Mazel tov,” she said.

“He’s right,” Newt said, touching her arm. “I gotta go.” Smoking had made him light-headed and now he felt nauseous. He was in no condition to stand, never mind to perform.

“If that’s what you think is best,” she said, with an emphasis on _you._

“Tell Viv and Laurie I’m sorry.”

Newt was braced for excoriation from Hermann, who was pale and gaunt and visibly shaking. But all Hermann did was lift his umbrella over Newt and put it into his hand—“Take it,” he said, and Newt did—so that he could wrap his arm around Newt and help him down the street. Newt realized that he needed the help.

The tube was still crowded enough to pass unnoticed. Newt could hardly stay standing. Every time the train moved or stopped, the world swirled around him like he was going down a drain. He closed his eyes, nauseous, and tried to hold on. His legs were trembling.

His eyes were still closed when, after a busy stop, hands guided him into an open seat. He gratefully sank down, holding Hermann’s arm to do so. At least in the crowded car, the screaming wheels in the echoing tunnel drowned out the noise in his head.

Hermann looked down at Newton, who was swaying in his seat with the motion of the train. Unaware or beyond caring about the people all around them, Newt leaned forward to rest his head on Hermann’s stomach. Hermann counted to five, then ran a hand through Newton’s wet hair. Then he gently pushed him back in his seat. Newt nodded vaguely, settling back.

*

By the time they returned to the hotel, Newt was refreshed by his underground nap and enlivened by the news of the transmitter. Hermann vetoed his request to stop at the bar for a brandy to “warm up” (“Absolutely not,”) but Newt insisted he only needed to eat something, and then he’d be ready to test it out.

“I cleaned,” Newt explained, back in their rooms.

“Is that what you did today?”

“Well, first, I made a mess,” said Newt as Hermann sat him down on the bed. “But I cleaned before I left for the gig so that you wouldn’t think I’d been kidnapped.”

“I still thought you had been, idiot,” Hermann said. “Take off your wet clothes. I’ll call for the food.”

“And put on what?”

“I bought clothes,” Hermann said testily.

Newt was wiping condensation off his glasses. “Those? No way.”

Hermann picked up the phone. “Catch a cold, then.”

“I will,” Newt said, putting his glasses back on.

“How are you feeling?”

“Fine.”

“Newton, you almost fainted on the tube. The transducer is affecting you. Tell me your symptoms.”

Newt sighed. “I’m fine. Dizziness. The associated nausea. Headache. Caused by... persistent ringing in my ear.”

“Ringing?” Hermann repeated, like he’d never heard of any such thing.

“Yes. Like when you’re lying in bed trying to fall asleep but you hear a little ‘eeeeeeee,’ you know? Like that. But much louder. And all the time.”

Hermann frowned.

After they had eaten, and after Hermann had told Newton what he’d learned from Chara and Birch, he at last surrendered the little green box. Newt sat on the floor cross-legged and unlocked it. Hermann, sitting at the desk, angled the lamp so he could see better. Newton’s hands moved intently, unhesitant, the same way he played piano—like what he held was part of him and equally manipulable. He flipped open the lid and tipped the transmitter into his palm. It glinted in the lamplight. Then he squeezed the seams of the metal and the device gracefully sprang open. The transmitter lay open in his palm like a butterfly. He lifted it up to examine his handiwork.

He nudged Hermann’s knee.

“Hm?”

“Glasses,” Newt said, not taking his eyes off his transmitter. “Let me borrow your readers.”

Hermann handed them over and Newt put them on in front of his glasses and squinted at the wiring and minuscule circuit board. Just watching him do it gave Hermann a headache.

“How do you work, little friend,” Newt muttered. He took a deep breath. “Well. After a week of waiting, months of wondering, and years of—” He glanced up at Hermann— “concealing the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence—”

Hermann rolled his eyes.

“—at last, at long, long last, let’s find out what you do.”

With a dramatic flick of the wrist, Newt used his fingernails to pinch the minuscule power switch.

Nothing happened.

Newt frowned, then took Hermann’s glasses off and shut the transmitter with a click.

“Nothing?” said Hermann.

Newt put it up to his ear.

“No.” He put it up to his other ear. “What the hell?”

“Is the transducer turned on?”

“It’s on. Trust me,” said Newt.

He opened the transmitter again. He squinted at its guts. Everything was in order, just like he remembered it.

“What if they aren’t even made to work with each other?” he muttered.

“Maybe they can’t,” said Hermann. “You made one. The other was made by the CIA. Maybe they aren’t synced. Or tuned.” Hermann frowned. “Is it tuned?”

“What?” Newt said, not listening.

“It’s a radio, isn’t it? Did you put a dial into it?”

“Hermann, what?” he said, looking up.

“Are they _tuned_ ,” Hermann said, “to the same _frequency_?”

Newt’s eyes widened. “Frequency. Frequency. Hermann!” He grabbed Hermann’s face and kissed him. “The frequency!”

Hermann, blinking, watched Newt jump up and scramble over the bed to fetch the—telephone?

“The day after I got it, I spent the _whole_ day hearing the ringing, it was _just_ out of range, and I kept trying to find ways to amplify it—I tried everything, I tried the radio, the TV, a glass over my ear, I even stuck a paperclip into it to see if I could make an antenna—didn’t work—but then, but then _you_ called, and I could hear it—a frequency, there was a resonant frequency—so that means it’s somewhere within the phone’s bandwidth! Between 300 and 3,500 Hz!”

Hermann stared.

“So, one of those three-thousand two- _hundred_ frequencies?”

“No!” said Newt, holding the receiver to his ear. He had dragged the phone cradle back across the bed and was sitting on the edge, his legs bouncing. “It’s 8!”

“8? How—”

“Here! Listen to it! No, dammit, what am I talking about, you won’t hear anything. It’s 8. The resonance. With the 8 tone.”

Newt was punching the 8 over and over again.

“All right, I believe you. I believe you!” Hermann put his hand on the cradle hang it up.

“What’s the 8 tone’s frequency?” said Newt.

“How on Earth should I know? Shouldn’t you?”

Newt was squeezing his eyes shut. “No, I don’t... the tone... There’s two. Each number has two frequencies. When you press a button, the two frequencies are transmitted down the line. Then the network interprets the paired frequencies and register which digits you pressed.” His hand was dancing, like he was turning the pages of a book. “So 8... 8...” He shook his head and opened his eyes. “I don’t know it.”

“But your memory—”

“I haven’t read every technical manual ever published,” Newt said impatiently. “We have to get one. Maybe it’s in the phone book. Maybe they know downstairs. I should call Lightcap, maybe she can—”

“May I?” said Hermann, and took the phone out of Newt’s hands before he could answer. He put the receiver to his ear and started dialing.

“Who are you calling?”

“Information,” said Hermann, adjusting the phone on his shoulder. “Good evening. I have what might seem like a strange question. No. Yes, I’m aware. It’s about telephones. Thank you. Could you please tell me what frequencies the 8 tone transmit? Yes.” There was a pause. “1,336 Hz... and 852? Thank you. Yes, you as well.” He rang off.

“Resourceful,” Newt said, taking the phone back and setting back on the bed.

“Thank you,” said Hermann. “So which one is it?”

“Not so fast,” said Newt, reopening his precious transmitter. “We’re finally getting to the interesting part.”

“Yes?”

“The transmitter has two tuners. And two antennas. And I never knew why.”

“Two?” said Hermann, watching as Newt tuned one with his fingernails, using Hermann’s readers as a magnifying glass. Hermann angled the lamp higher. “Can you see those numbers? They’re minuscule.”

“Just barely,” Newt said, squinting. “8...52. And...”

“1,336.”

“13...3...6...” Newt moved to the other tiny dial. “I always wondered why there were two. The antennas are absolutely tiny too. This thing probably has a range of about five feet.”

“So don’t go too far.”

“Mm.”

Newt squinted.

“Done.” He frowned. “It’s tuned.”

Hermann stared at him expectantly.

“Nothing?” he said after a moment.

Newt made a frustrated noise.

“Are you sure it’s tuned correctly?”

“No—” Newt squinted. “I can hardly see these goddamn dials. Hold this?”

Hermann took the transmitter and held it out. Newt leaned in to examine it.

"Is it at 1,336?” said Hermann.

"Yeah, should be..."

Newt felt odd.

“Well, do you hear anything?”

“No, not...”

A question was pressing into Newt’s thoughts but he didn’t know what it was. Like an idea he’d had, but just forgotten—it would come back if he could look at the object his eyes had lit on just a moment before—what was the object? He could see objects, but he couldn’t move his eyes.

He was seeing something else.

“It’s working,” he tried to say, but the sound was distant and doubled, vibrating through his skull but also coming from behind glass. It felt like he was sinking in a pool, letting all the oxygen out of his lungs in a stream of bubbles, sinking down, lower, from the bright warm surface to the cool dark deep.

There was music playing.

Newt was distantly aware of his own hands closing around the bedspread, gripping the fabric, and his eyes closing. He sank deeper: he saw slats of light on a summer evening, he saw the marble corridor of a museum, he saw the signals lab; he saw the directory and the IBM and Wesley from behind; an accented voice said, _I think he was a test subject._ Ravel was playing over an intercom system, a muffled 5-measure loop in red and black; they were standing in a white hospital room, looking at a balding man in a white bed. His face was turned away.

He saw the interior of a phone booth, _I think he was a test subject. They made me listen..._ He was dialing a phone number—the hotel phone number. Each number was a different color. When he lifted the receiver, the voice that spoke was emerald green.

_I think he was a test subject._

Something was pulsing. Was it in his head, or outside? His eyes were closed, but he saw someone sitting in front of him, someone who looked ill and felt green, emerald green, someone gripping the bedspread and tipping dangerously to the left...

“Newton—”

The word vibrated through his head like he had said it himself.

A chair moved abruptly and there was a scuffling sound, and then everything was dark and silent again, or as silent as it ever was, inside of Newt’s head.

The ringing had stopped.

Also, he was on the floor.

“Are you all right? What happened? Did you hear something? Can you sit up—?”

“Dude,” croaked Newt as Hermann sat him upright. He couldn’t open his eyes. “I think you have synesthesia.”

“Are you—what?”

Newt started coughing violently.

When he came to, he was sitting against the bed and Hermann was holding his chin in his hands, pressing something against his face.

“What’s this?” he mumbled. He realized belatedly that he had briefly blacked out.

“Your nose is bleeding,” said Hermann, pressing the handkerchief into his nose. “Tip your head forward.”

Newt did the opposite and tipped his head back. Blood dripped down his pharynx, making him cough again. He leaned forward, hacking. The floor pitched below him.

“Are you going to be sick?”

Newt, eyes still closed, managed, “Maybe.”

Hermann helped him to his feet with difficulty. They made it a few steps before Newt’s legs gave out, and he heard a hiss of pain.

“Oh—Hermann, are you okay? Put me down, I’m okay—”

“Are you—?”

“No, just—”

Newt helped Hermann pivot them clumsily. They collapsed onto the bed.

Newt lay still on his back, breathing in through his nose and out his mouth, feeling the nausea ebb. He could hear Hermann’s tense breathing next to him.

“Did I twist your hip?” Newt said after a moment.

“I’m fine.”

“I’m sorry.”

There was another breathless pause.

“Synesthesia,” Newt said again.

“What are you talking about?” said Hermann hoarsely.

“It’s a perception thing,” Newt said, not opening his eyes. He was still weirdly breathless. “Colors... associated with other sensory input. Like numbers, or letters... Even smells, or sounds. It’s a... a sense thing.”

He cautiously opened his eyes and checked the handkerchief. Not much blood.

“Associating numbers with colors? Everybody does that,” Hermann said to the ceiling. “It’s mnemonic.”

“Not everybody,” Newt murmured.

“What happened, Newton?” said Hermann.

“It worked,” Newt said. “It’s a mind-reading device.”

 

*

Hermann had dropped the device when Newt had fainted. Once Newt explained, he refused point-blank to pick it up again.

“Come on!” said Newt a few minutes later. “I feel fine. Let’s try again.”

“Absolutely not,” said Hermann. “It’s much too dangerous! Look at yourself!”

“I feel fine!”

“You don’t, Newton, and in any case I do not want you _listening_ to my thoughts!”

 _They made me listen,_ Birch had said. _They made me listen._

“It wasn’t really sonic,” Newt said. “It was actually mostly seeing. Like seeing your memories. I got snippets of your day. Lots of colors, of course. You’re a much more visual thinker than I would have guessed, by the way.”

Hermann was shaking his head incredulously.

“When you do math—when you look at numbers, or codes—ciphers—are the letters and numbers each different colors? Is that how you’re so good at it?”

Hermann closed his eyes, still shaking his head. “Stop—what did you see?”

“Oh, is this why you won’t do it again? Because you’re worried I’m going to see something embarrassing in there?”

“No,” said Hermann, coloring. “Because of Birch.”

“What about him?”

“He was a test subject.”

“What? For this?”

“Yes, and Newton, he’s completely gone. I’m certain he’s not the only person whose brain was damaged by trials of this device.”

“But we—”

“We need to take it out,” Hermann said firmly. “We know what it does. We know. That’s enough. That’s all we need.”

“Take it _out?_ Now? No way!”

“Newton, it’s too dangerous! We need to return it to the Americans. If we cooperate, they might be lenient.”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa. Give it _back?_ ”

“Yes!”

“This device? Hermann, have you thought about what this could mean?”

“Yes, it could—”

“No, no, I mean in the hands of the government! This is completely unethical!”

That stopped Hermann up short.

“Did you even stop to think about how a government would use something like this? Picture it—no more interrogations. No more polygraphs. No more secrets. Of _any_ kind.” He shook his head. “This is way too dangerous. Not for me. For _everyone._ ”

Hermann paused, his mouth open to object.

“No wonder they all want it so bad,” Newt muttered. “Imagine what this would mean for surveillance. I mean—you worked for GCHQ. You hardly even _have_ to imagine it.”

Hermann frowned at his accusatory tone.

“Excuse me, but were you about to take that thing and use it to dub yourself the savior of liberty? You make _bugs,_ Newton, for the British secret services.”

“Yes, for them to use on other _spies,_ ” Newt snapped. “That’s not the same as eavesdropping on people’s _thoughts._ ”

“All right, but you’re _hardly_ the antiauthoritarian rebel—”

“Oh, shut up, you loyalist. Yeah, take the gadget right back to our boss. Take it upstairs to _Victor_. Wield it to serve your queen and fucking country. Kiss my ass.”

Hermann sighed noisily, trying to cover his rising panic. “Stop being unreasonable. If it’s dangerous and unethical, we ought to take it out and destroy it. Let me take it out.”

“No way,” said Newt again, leaning away from Hermann. “You can’t. We already tried.”

“Then let’s go to a doctor.”

“No!”

Hermann sat back and raised his hands in truce. Newt eyed him warily.

Then Newt’s eyes slipped away from Hermann and fixed on the window. “I know what happened,” he said.

“What?” said Hermann.

“In the stables.”

“What do you mean?”

Newt looked up at Hermann.

“It was a setup. The Division wanted to steal this tech from the CIA. I’m the decoy. They wanted to steal it and then pin it on me.”

“Newton, that makes no sense.”

“No, think about it. The fifth floor put all the clues in front of me. Made it look like it I had means and motive. Their plan only backfired because I got there first.”

Hermann frowned and looked away. It didn’t make sense—the Division didn’t operate that way. It was clumsy, as an institution, but not mercenary.

“And Becket,” Newt was saying. “Becket is the fixer.”

“Newton, that’s ridiculous.”

Hermann looked back up at him. Newt was watching him closely.

“Can I try it again?”

“What?”

“I’ll let you take it out, if you let me try it out. One more time.”

What would he see if he did?

Hermann shook his head.

“No,” he said. “No.”

That night they both dreamed of the lake.

**END OF PART 2**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Special thanks to Sasha again in this chapter, for letting me steal her synesthesia idea and for troubleshooting my portrayal thereof. 
> 
> Transducer will be going on a short hiatus while I wrap up writing Part 3. When we resume, chapters will be posted every Friday through the end. For an updated date, watch this endnote, or my tumblr (@ davidfosterwallace2ndgromit). Fic mixes [here](https://davidfosterwallace2ndgromit.tumblr.com/post/185756646448/).


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